Founding Product Lead

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. No central store of customer PII: identity data is sharded, encrypted and distributed, so there is nothing to breach and a per-decision 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, 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.
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.
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. Be able to vide code and test products integration. 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
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 have worked in fintech, compliance, fraud, identity, risk or payments, or you can explain convincingly why you would be good at it fast.
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.
$50k total compensation.
Milan as initial hub and New York, optional quarterly offsites. We care where your overlap is, not where you sit.
How to apply
No cover letter. Send your CV or LinkedIn plus written answers to these two, under 200 words each. We read these first and the CV second.
You are 40 minutes into a demo with the MLRO of a mid-size EU payments firm. She stops you: "This is impressive, but I am the one who goes to prison, not your agent. My board will not accept AI closing alerts without a human reviewing every single one. Thanks for coming in."
Write the next thing you say. Actual spoken words, not a description of your approach.
Name the best product thing you have shipped. What it was, who used it, the number it moved before and after, and what you personally did that would not have happened otherwise. Stated so that a reference call could confirm or deny it.
We reply to everyone who answers both. We do not reply to answers written by a model, and we can tell.

Work arrangement
Yes