Founding Product owner / CPO (FINCRIME)

The company Zyphe builds AI agents that complete compliance work rather than surfacing it. Banks, fintechs, EMIs, crypto exchanges and payment platforms run KYC, KYB and AML review through queues of alerts. Analysts open each one, gather evidence, make a call, write it up. Our agents do that work inside the tools those teams already use, and their officers approve every decision. There is no central store of customer PII: identity data is sharded, encrypted and distributed, so there is nothing to breach, and every decision has an audit trail an examiner can actually follow. Our customers are regulated by the OCC, FDIC, FCA and Fed. We are past first revenue and growing. We are running a pilot with one of the largest compliance BPOs in the UK, and we are raising a larger round on the back of the next few quarters.

The thesis you would be executing: The compliance software layer is dying. Companies with money are building triage and monitoring in house because building is now cheap. Companies without money were never going to pay for a seat licence anyway. Nobody needs another dashboard that produces more alerts to look at. What is left worth selling is the completed work. The distinction is Claude versus Devin: one is a tool you operate, the other is a colleague who does the job. We are building the second thing, for compliance, and pricing it per resolution rather than per seat. Where this ends: a compliance function made of an MLRO or BSA officer plus agents that do the analyst work. In this market, winning comes down to numbers: how many cases you resolve, how accurately, and how defensible the audit trail is. If you think that is wrong, we would rather argue with you than convert you.

The role: You would sit between our CTO and everyone else, and own product, delivery and the roadmap while he owns the technology. Concretely, in your first two quarters:

• Own the roadmap and the deadlines. Not a backlog. The commitments we make to customers and whether we hit them.
• Be in the customer calls. Our engineering team is not, and it costs us.
• You would sit with MLROs and heads of compliance, work out what they actually need underneath what they ask for, and turn that into scoped work an engineer can estimate.
• Run the design partner program with us. We are onboarding a small group of design partners chosen because they want to automate, not because they have large analyst teams to keep busy.
• You would turn their feedback into product and prove the numbers that matter: cases resolved, accuracy, audit trail quality.
• Build the definition layer we do not have. Requests reach us as 'we need a KYB tool.' They need to reach engineering as something specific enough to build once instead of three times.
• Close the loop between sales and product. Deal data lives in HubSpot, work lives in Linear, and the two do not talk. Won and lost reasons should drive what we build next, and today they do not.
• Ship. Roughly half your time in the code. This is not a role where you write tickets and wait.
• Hire, eventually. Slowly, and only people who raise the bar.

What is actually true here: We would rather you learn this now than in month two. We move fast and we sometimes commit to customers ahead of the product. We have no product definition process, which is the main reason this role exists. Our KYB product works but needs a rebuild because we grew it feature by feature instead of designing it. Our engineers are all senior and will push back on you, which is a feature. There is real revenue and real regulatory pressure, so the quality bar is high, and 'move fast and break things' does not survive contact with a bank's CISO. If a job description that admits this makes you less interested, this is not the right seat.

Who you are: The profile we want most: you have run product for FinCrime, KYC, KYB or onboarding inside a fintech, bank or payments company. You have watched analysts work through manual review queues, you know where the hours go, and you know what an MLRO will and will not sign off on. You are the customer we are building for, now on the other side of the table. We will also seriously consider people who built identity verification, onboarding flows or case management at a RegTech provider. If that is you, show us you understand the buyer's side and not just the vendor's. Beyond that:

• You have taken a product from zero to paying customers, and you can name it and the number it moved.
• You are technical enough to build, and you have chosen not to make that your whole identity.
• You are comfortable being the most organised person in the room and the reason a date holds.
• You can disagree with a CTO and a CEO without needing to win.
• You want equity more than salary, and you understand what that trade actually means.

Do not apply if you want to manage a team rather than do the work, you need a defined process to be effective, you have never had a customer be angry at you directly, or you are looking for your next title.

Compensation: Founding-team equity, meaningfully sized, four-year vest with a one-year cliff. Salary is below what you would earn at a large company, and we will be direct about the number in the first conversation. $70k to $100k total compensation.

Location: Milan as the initial hub, plus New York, with optional quarterly offsites. We care where your overlap is, not where you sit.