Head of Applied AI
Catena Labs is building the first AI-native financial institution, a regulated entity designed for AI agents and their human collaborators. They aim to enable AI to securely identify itself and transact safely, providing a trusted partner for the new economic era of AI. Their services will leverage AI-native money, such as regulated stablecoins, and create bridges to traditional banking and payment systems to support the agent economy.
Funding
About Catena Labs
Catena Labs' internal building blocks include the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), which is a free, open-source collection of patterns and components designed to address AI agent identity and payments. The source code and further information are available at agentcommercekit.com. The company invites interested parties to contact them to explore using their technology and services.
Skills
About the Role
You'll lead the AI Platform team, combining hands-on AI engineering with data science and technical direction-setting. You'll build systems directly while shaping how AI works across the company, both in products and internal operations. You'll own the tools, models, frameworks, and eval processes used internally and within products, ensuring AI integrates reliably with Banking Core via APIs, MCP, and other interfaces. You'll work across product AI (agent interactions, identity, risk), operational AI (compliance workflows, automation), and corporate AI (how the team uses AI daily). Initially this is an 80/20 maker/manager role, where you'll build on an existing foundation while growing the team.
Requirements
- Deep experience shipping production AI systems, whether that's a decade in ML or fewer years with intensive focus on the current LLM paradigm
- Builds things directly and codes rather than managing without coding
- Strong intuition for model selection, eval methodology, and build-vs-buy tradeoffs
- Security-minded, understanding prompt injection and adversarial inputs
- Comfortable with ambiguity, able to set direction while shipping
- Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated financial services (nice to have)
- Hands-on work with agent orchestration frameworks (nice to have)
- Background in compliance or risk systems where auditability matters (nice to have)
Responsibilities
- Own the orchestration layer connecting product experiences to banking infrastructure
- Establish eval frameworks that prove agents are reliable
- Stay ahead of emerging agent protocols (A2A, x402, MCP, LangGraph) and integrate where it strengthens infrastructure
- Partner closely with Product Development and Banking Core to ensure AI capabilities are deeply integrated
- Hire and develop AI engineers and data scientists as the team grows