Founding Head of Financial Services

Job title: Founding Head of Financial Services

Location: London; 4 days in-office, 1 day wfh

Reports to: Chief Commercial Officer

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Cosine at a glance Cosine is the UK's frontier AI lab for autonomous software engineering - not another coding assistant, but our own models, agent stack, eval harnesses, and product layer. We build our agent tooling entirely in-house and post train open source models to deliver reliable, enterprise grade coding performance in security critical settings.

Our offerings can be used as SaaS, deployed on VPC, on prem or fully air gapped. Through this flexability, we are able to service large scale, highly regulated enterprises and industries including defence, financial service and healthcare.

We're backed by YC and were recently selected for the UK's sovereign AI programme. The company is at a rare stage: deep technical work, real enterprise pull, and a chance to shape how AI is deployed inside defence, banking, government, and other high trust environments.

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Mission Own Cosine's financial services engagement and GTM motion from founder led relationship building into a repeatable commercial engine.

The role exists to turn Cosine's current sovereign AI momentum with banks, insurers, market infrastructure firms, payments companies, and other regulated financial institutions into deep executive relationships, clearly understood customer priorities, and qualified commercial opportunities.

This is a critical sector building role: part enterprise sales, part partnerships, part market development, part community building, and part GTM leadership.

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Core responsibilities 1. Lead engagement with financial services coalition partners and target enterprises

• Own Cosine's day to day engagement with financial services organisations already involved in the sovereign AI coalition.
• Build new relationships with other priority FS enterprises, including banks, insurers, payments networks, asset managers, exchanges, infrastructure providers, and technology leadership teams inside major financial institutions.
• Maintain a clear account map across key organisations, including executive sponsors, technical champions, innovation leads, procurement stakeholders, risk/compliance owners, and engineering decision makers.
• Move relationships from broad sovereign AI interest into specific, practical areas where Cosine can create value.

2. Build multi threaded senior relationships

• Develop relationships across multiple divisions, business units, and seniority levels in each target account.
• Engage CIO, CTO, CISO, engineering, platform, architecture, innovation, digital transformation, risk, compliance, procurement, and business line stakeholders.
• Identify how priorities differ across teams, for example technology productivity, software assurance, secure AI deployment, operational resilience, model governance, cost reduction, and legacy modernisation.
• Build enough trust that Cosine becomes part of the strategic conversation.

3. Build Cosine's understanding of FS sovereign AI priorities

• Run structured discovery across financial services organisations to understand what they truly care about in sovereign AI.
• Capture use cases, constraints, buying triggers, objections, governance requirements, security expectations, deployment models, and success metrics.
• Translate customer signal into internal intelligence for sales, product, research, engineering, marketing, and leadership.
• Build a sector view of where Cosine has the strongest right to win, including priority use cases, highest intent accounts, likely buyer personas, and repeatable commercial narratives.

4. Build towards commercial opportunities

• Convert relationship building and market education into qualified pipeline opportunities.
• Identify where there is a real business problem, budget owner, technical champion, procurement path, and reason to act now.
• Shape opportunities into concrete next steps: workshops, technical deep dives, discovery sessions, pilots, proof of concepts, deployment planning, or commercial proposals.
• Work with wider GTM team to move qualified FS opportunities through the sales cycle.
• Keep a clear view of account status, stakeholder map, open actions, risks, next steps, and commercial likelihood.

The role should focus deeply on commercial pull: serious conversations, mapped accounts, live opportunities, pilots, and ultimately revenue.

5. Organise joint events and relationship building forums

• Design and run high quality FS focused events (e.g. roundtables) that deepen relationships and create market signal.
• Organise closed door roundtables, private dinners, technical briefings, executive sessions, partner workshops, and coalition follow ups.
• Use events to move beyond generic AI discussion and into specific FS themes: sovereign deployment, governed software engineering, AI assurance, legacy systems, risk, resilience, and operational control.

6. Help build the GTM team in financial services

• Help define what the FS GTM motion should become as Cosine scales.
• Build the early playbook for account selection, stakeholder mapping, discovery, qualification, event led selling, partner led entry, pilot design, and commercial progression.
• Help recruit, onboard, and develop future GTM hires focused on financial services.
• Establish the operating cadence for the sector: account reviews, pipeline tracking, event follow up, customer insight capture, and internal reporting.
• Work closely with SDRs, partnerships, marketing, founders, and enterprise sales to make FS a repeatable vertical

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What good looks like in the first 6 months

• Multi threaded relationships established across the most important accounts.
• The three top priority accounts are established, including existing coalition partners and new high priority targets, and business cases set out.
• A structured view of FS sovereign AI use cases, buyer priorities, objections, and buying triggers.
• Qualified opportunities progressing into discovery, technical deep dives, pilots, or commercial proposals.
• A clear FS GTM playbook that future hires can build from.

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Success metrics Relationship and market development

• Number of priority FS accounts actively engaged. That said, depth is more important than raw number here.
• Number of senior stakeholder relationships built across target accounts.
• Number of multi threaded accounts with executive, technical, and commercial coverage.
• Quality of customer insight captured on sovereign AI priorities, deployment requirements, and use cases.

Commercial progression

• Qualified FS opportunities created.
• Workshops, technical deep dives, pilots, or proposals initiated.
• Pipeline generated or influenced.
• Conversion of coalition engagement into live commercial next steps.
• Evidence that Cosine is becoming a serious strategic partner in target accounts.

Team and operating system

• FS account map and stakeholder tracker built and maintained.
• Repeatable cadence established for account reviews, event follow up, and sector reporting.
• Future FS GTM hiring profile defined.

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Cosine's responsibilities Cosine will support the role with:

• Founder access for senior meetings and strategic accounts.
• Existing coalition relationships and warm routes into relevant FS organisations.
• Support from partnerships, marketing, product, engineering, ML, and legal where needed.
• Enterprise grade materials on sovereign AI, deployment models, security, product architecture, and ROI.
• Budget for high signal dinners, roundtables, workshops, and customer events.
• Clear internal ownership for technical escalation, pilot scoping, legal/procurement, and product feedback.
• A single accountable line manager for commercial direction and prioritisation.

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Candidate profile This role is likely to suit someone who:

• Has sold, partnered, or built relationships inside financial services, ideally with banks, insurers, payments firms, exchanges, or regulated infrastructure providers.
• Can credibly engage senior stakeholders while still doing the account by account follow up work themselves.
• Understands complex enterprise buying cycles and knows how to move from relationship to qualified opportunity.
• Is comfortable with ambiguity, sector building, and founder led GTM rather than inheriting a mature sales machine.
• Can organise high signal executive events and turn them into commercial momentum.
• Thinks commercially, writes clearly, and can build account plans, briefing notes, proposals, and internal decision materials without heavy supervision.
• Has the judgement to know when a conversation is just interesting and when it is becoming real pipeline.
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