Jobs · Engineering · California

Domain Expert, Financial Services

Sycamore · Palo Alto, CA · 1 wk ago
Engineering$65/hrFull-time

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate AI agents that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need. We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

Financial services at Sycamore

Banking, capital markets, and specialty lending run enormous volumes of document-heavy, judgment-heavy, and heavily governed work. Client onboarding and periodic review. Sanctions and transaction-alert triage. Credit analysis and investment memo preparation. Collateral and title verification. Model risk documentation. Vendor and third-party risk review. Regulatory examination evidence. Almost all of it has the shape our platform is built for: extract the facts with citations, apply the deterministic rules, route the ambiguous middle to a person with the right authority, and leave a record that survives examination. What these firms will not do is adopt something they cannot explain to a regulator. That constraint is where your expertise matters most.

What you will do

  • Serve as the domain authority on customer deployments in your industry, from discovery through production.
  • Translate real operational processes into specifications precise enough to build from: decision points, roles and authority, rules, thresholds, escalation, and evidence requirements.
  • Supply and maintain the rule corpus a workflow applies, and mark clearly which decisions must never be automated.
  • Define what correct output looks like, and act as the calibration source when we evaluate agent quality against real cases.
  • Own the regulatory and control framing: which requirements apply, which body asks, and what evidence satisfies them.
  • Build trust with customer operators, executives, and control functions as someone who has done their job.
  • Feed patterns back to Product and Core AI so that what we learn in one deployment becomes a platform capability rather than a repeated conversation.
  • Help our commercial team evaluate which opportunities in your industry are real and which are not.

What we are looking for

  • 10+ years in financial services, in a role where you owned or governed the actual process: operations, credit, compliance, risk, audit, or a front-office function with real accountability.
  • Fluency with the control environment: model risk management, examination and audit, information barriers, third-party risk, and record retention.
  • Direct experience with the operational reality of at least one of: client onboarding and periodic review, credit or investment analysis, financial crime and sanctions operations, or regulatory reporting.
  • The ability to write a process down precisely, clearly enough that an engineer can build from your account of a workflow's decision points, authority limits, and exception paths.
  • Judgment about automation. You know which parts of your domain are genuinely rule-based, which require expertise, and which should never be delegated to software at all.
  • Executive presence and high EQ. You can be the credible voice with a customer's operators and their leadership in the same conversation.
  • Intellectual honesty. You will sometimes need to tell us that something we built is wrong, or that a customer's request is a bad idea.
  • AI-native. You use modern AI systems in your own work and can reason about where they help and where they mislead.
  • Comfort with startup ambiguity, broad ownership, and regular customer travel. You do not need to be technical in the software sense. You do need to be precise, and you need to be genuinely curious about how the system works.

Interview process

  • A 30-minute introductory conversation.
  • Two 60-minute conversations, one on the operational depth of your domain and one on how you would specify a workflow for a build team.
  • A working session where you take a real process from your industry, specify it end to end, and defend the decisions you made about authority, thresholds, and what should not be automated.

Why join

  • Put deep domain expertise directly into production software rather than into recommendations.
  • Work alongside engineers who will build what you specify, in the same week.
  • Define how agents handle consequential work in an industry you know well.
  • Sit at the front of a category that is still being defined, with real influence over what gets built.
  • Join early enough to shape how Sycamore approaches your industry.
  • Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build.

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