About
Daniil Kutsyna. Applied AI engineer, product engineer, founding engineer. London, UK.
World-class Applied AI and product engineer. More than a programmer: product taste, an eye for design, 10+ years of front-ends people actually use, and real understanding of fintech, insurance and prop-tech. Building the context layer and the company brain that make AI work across a whole company, and getting people to adopt it. No BS. Enjoy making it happen.
Now
AI Engineer at OakNorth Bank, a bank for entrepreneurs in the UK and US. Building the context layer for an AI-native bank: context, memory, brain. Part of a 3x productivity increase.
Before
- AI Engineer at Abound: agents for operations, underwriting support, taking the engineering org AI-native.
- Founding Engineer at Nettle: contractor, then first hire. MVP from scratch, several iterations.
- Founder-in-Residence at Antler: day 0 of company building.
- Front-end lead and senior front-end roles at Diesta, Domestic & General, finlink.de, Brewin Dolphin, SmartXpo and Portmone, 2017 to 2024.
- Freelance and startups before that. 30+ hackathons across Europe.
Two Master's degrees: Software Engineering (University of Tartu), Informatics (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv). Mostly self-taught anyway.
Beyond code
- Product taste: what to build and what to leave out; ship, measure, iterate
- Eye for design: design systems, component libraries, a decade of front-ends; how it looks and feels matters
- Domain: fintech (banking, lending, wealth, payments), insurance and prop-tech, regulated parts included
- AI adoption: getting people and teams to actually change how they work, not just install a tool
- Startups: founder-in-residence, first hire, advising early stage founders
- Leadership: led technical teams, hiring and onboarding, mentoring
- No BS: direct, curious about how things work and don't work, enjoy making it happen
Open to
Applied AI Engineer, Product Engineer, Founding Engineer, Provisional CTO roles.
Great match for:
- Applied AI roles: agents, context layers and company brains, in production
- Product Engineer: owning the problem end to end - the product call, the design, the build, the ship
- Founding Engineer: zero-to-one, first hire, MVP from scratch
- Provisional CTO: early teams that want AI-native engineering and product from day one
- Companies adopting AI: taking a whole org AI-native, people and process included
Verify
- Most of this work is B2B and internal: tools, processes and products, under NDA. No public screenshots, demos or client names, by design
- Employment history: the same roles and dates are on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniil-kutsyna/), and each role links to the company's own site
- Employment is verifiable through a standard background check
- Numbers such as 3x and 10x+ are my own account of the work, not audited figures; happy to walk through them on a call
- References can be arranged on request