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Founders Associate - AI

Taptap Send

Taptap Send

Software Engineering, Data Science
Dubai - United Arab Emirates · London, UK
Posted on Feb 26, 2026

Location

Dubai, London

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

No Department

About Us

We’re building the world’s leading cross-border fintech for emerging markets - empowering families, fueling local economies, and changing how millions access financial services.

Since our launch in 2019, we have transformed how money moves across borders with our operations spanning 6 out of 7 continents and covering both the busiest and most underserved (remittance) corridors. We tapped into a massive shift - from banks to phones - bringing digital finance to places where traditional systems never reached. The next stage of growth will fuel a network of services and products especially designed to make money more accessible to diaspora communities including local cards, and additional savings and payments features.

We’re growing fast, backed by world-class investors, and scaling a product that blends real world impact with cutting edge fintech innovation.

Here’s a little more:

  • Founded by Harvard grads and 3-time founders who previously built Segovia (acquired) and GiveDirectly (>$300M revenue, fastest-growing NGO in the world)

  • Backed by top investors including Spark Capital, Canaan, Reid Hoffman, Breyer Capital, Unbound, Wamda, and more

  • Built by global top performers from Bain, Google, McKinsey, Uber, Checkout, Bolt, and beyond - we move fast, stay humble, and care deeply about our mission

  • Truly global team - 250+ people, 50+ nationalities, 50+ languages

  • Guided by our values - ownership, impact, humility, and heart - in deed, not just word

About the Role

TapTap Send is looking for someone to fundamentally change how the company works with AI. This isn't a product role - it's an operational transformation role. You'll work directly with the CEO and founding team to identify high-leverage opportunities across every function, build the bots and agents that capture them, and drive adoption until AI-augmented work becomes the default, not the exception.

We have 50+ people across research, data, operations, compliance, growth, and finance. Most workflows still run on human effort and manual processes. The right person will see that as a massive opportunity - not to replace people, but to make them dramatically more effective.

What You'll Do

  • Audit every team and function to map where AI agents, bots, and copilots can eliminate toil, accelerate decisions, or improve output quality

  • Build and deploy AI agents; from internal Slack bots and document processors to research copilots and automated QA pipelines - using the best available tools (Claude, GPT, open-source models, custom fine-tunes)

  • Own the full stack: scoping, prototyping, building, deploying, measuring impact, iterating. You ship, you don't just advise

  • Design and run an internal AI adoption programme - training, templates, prompt libraries, office hours; that gets every team using AI tools confidently within their workflows

  • Work with the CEO to set quarterly AI transformation targets and report progress against them. This role has board-level visibility

  • Evaluate and integrate third-party AI tooling (coding assistants, meeting summarizers, analytics copilots, etc.) and negotiate vendor relationships where needed

  • Build the connective tissue between teams: shared knowledge bases, RAG systems over internal docs, automated reporting, and cross-functional agent workflows

  • Stay relentlessly current on the frontier; new models, new capabilities, new patterns and translate that into practical internal applications within days, not months

Requirements

  • Deep hands-on experience building AI-powered tools and agents: not just using ChatGPT, but architecting multi-step pipelines, RAG systems, and autonomous workflows

  • Strong engineering fundamentals: you can write production code, set up infrastructure, and debug at 2am if needed. Python is table stakes; experience with LLM APIs, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, etc.) is expected

  • A bias for speed and pragmatism over perfection: You'd rather ship a working bot in a week than spec a platform for six months

  • Exceptional communication skills: you'll need to sell AI adoption to skeptical teams, train non-technical users, and present to the board

  • Experience working in a fast-moving startup or scale-up environment, ideally fintech or financial services

  • A genuine obsession with AI and what it can do: You follow the space daily, you've built side projects, you have strong opinions on which models are best for which tasks

  • Comfort with ambiguity and a self-starting mentality. This role doesn't have a playbook - you'll write it

Nice to Have

  • Experience leading or managing a small team (this role may grow into a team lead)

  • Background in data science, ML engineering, or quantitative research

  • Familiarity with compliance and regulatory environments - understanding what can and can't be automated in financial services

  • Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent-to-agent communication, or building tools that plug into existing SaaS platforms

  • Prior experience at a remittance, payments, or neobank company

Taptap Values

Impact first

Team next

Accept reality

Propose solutions

Win with grit

Be proactively candid, with yourself and others

Love the particular

Own it

Create positive energy

Maybe, even have fun

Taptap Send is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce. All employment decisions are decided on the basis of qualifications, experience and business need. We strongly encourage applications who are members of underrepresented communities to apply.

If you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process, please do not hesitate to let us know. Any information you provide us in this respect will only be used to accommodate your requirements.

Note: we recognize imposter syndrome is real - any candidate that does not perfectly fit every characteristic of this role is still strongly encouraged to apply.