---
title: About
description: Who Daniil Kutsyna is: Applied AI and product engineer in London, what he builds and what he is open to.
canonical: https://daniilkutsyna.com/about
last-updated: 2026-11-13
---

# 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

## More

- [Selected work](https://daniilkutsyna.com/work)
- [Full CV, PDF](https://daniilkutsyna.com/cv__daniil_kutsyna.pdf)
- [Full CV, Markdown](https://daniilkutsyna.com/cv.md)
- [Contact](https://daniilkutsyna.com/contact)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniil-kutsyna/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/username255)