As Head of Research, you will own Arva AI’s AI strategy, roadmap, and model quality outcomes. You will lead a team building agentic systems that handle 92% of financial crime reviews automatically. Your work directly enables regulated institutions to trust AI for high-stakes AML and KYC workflows through rigorous evaluation and explainability.
Head of Research at Arva AI
Arva AI is looking for a Head of Research to lead the development of AI agents that automate 92% of financial crime compliance reviews. Backed by Y Combinator and Google’s Gradient Ventures, this is an opportunity to build and scale a research function from the ground up in Central London. You will own the roadmap for LLMs and vision models, ensuring the accuracy and explainability required by regulated banks. If you have 5+ years of applied AI experience and want to define how AI earns trust in global finance, join us at Arva AI to solve high-stakes compliance challenges.
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Location
London, United Kingdom
Compensation
£130k-£180k + Equity
Company
Arva AI
Role overview
SoftwareLewes, United States
Backed by Google’s AI fund and Y Combinator, Arva AI is revolutionising financial crime intelligence with our cutting-edge AI Agents. By automating manual human review tasks, we enhance operational efficiency and help financial institutions handle AML, KYB and KYC reviews, cutting costs by 80%.
What you will do
- Define the research roadmap, making strategic build-vs-adapt decisions across fine-tuning, distillation, and bespoke model training for LLMs and vision systems.
- Own company-level model quality, establishing the benchmarks, evaluation infrastructure, and regression suites required for high-accuracy financial crime automation.
- Partner cross-functionally with product and engineering teams to bridge the gap between research and production, ensuring rapid, safe deployment of new models.
Who this is a fit for
- Has 5+ years of experience in applied AI research or ML engineering, with a proven track record of moving research agendas into production.
- Possesses hands-on expertise in training and fine-tuning LLMs and vision models, specifically within agentic systems or high-reliability environments.
- Thrives in early-stage startup environments, demonstrating comfort with ambiguity and a strong desire to own mission-critical technical outcomes from day one.
Why this role is remarkable
- Lead the research function from the ground up, setting the technical agenda and building a world-class team for a fast-scaling YC startup.
- Join a well-funded team (seed led by Gradient Ventures) already shipping product to regulated financial institutions with real-world impact on global compliance.
- Solve unique challenges at the frontier of applied AI, where model accuracy, speed, and explainability are critical for regulatory trust and automation.
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