---
title: Daniil Kutsyna
description: Daniil Kutsyna - Applied AI Engineer - Building AI native teams and products
canonical: https://daniilkutsyna.com/
last-updated: 2026-11-13
---

# Daniil Kutsyna

Applied AI engineer, product engineer, founding engineer. London, UK.

## Building AI native teams and products

10+ years of experience across Fintech, InsureTech and PropTech: engineer with product taste and an eye for design, launching and growing sustainable tech products and teams, advising and working with early stage founders. Lately: context layers, company brains, AI adoption.

From 100+ year old enterprises, to scale-ups before the AI age, and AI native startups; part of digital transformations for multiple businesses across Europe.

Mostly self-taught, no bs, curious about how things work and don't work. Enjoy making it happen.

## Open to

Open to conversations about Applied AI Engineer, Product Engineer, Founding Engineer and 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

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

Current focus:

- Context layers for companies
- Company brains: shared context and memory for an organisation
- AI adoption and moving teams to AI-native ways of working
- Visuals and teaching AI beauty: how to explain taste to a model and verify the result
- Software factories and dark factories

## Experience

| Company | Role | When | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| OakNorth Bank | AI Engineer | May 2026 – Present | Bank for entrepreneurs in the UK and US. Building an AI-native bank. |
| Abound (formerly Fintern) | AI Engineer | Mar 2025 – May 2026 | Consumer credit-technology platform. Transforming an ML leader into an AI-native company. |
| Nettle | Founding Engineer | Jan 2025 – Feb 2025 | Insurtech startup. Zero-to-one MVP. |
| Antler | Founder-in-Residence | Oct 2024 – Nov 2024 | VC incubator startup program. Deep dive into day 0 of company building. |
| Abound (formerly Fintern) | Senior Front-End Engineer | Jan 2024 – Nov 2024 | Consumer credit-technology startup. Platform scaling. |
| Diesta | Front-End Lead | May 2023 – Dec 2023 | Insurtech startup. MVPs and early traction. |
| Domestic & General | Senior Front-End Engineer | Aug 2022 – Apr 2023 | Insurance company. Platform optimisation. |
| finlink.de (Bilthouse-Gruppe) | Senior Front-End Engineer | Sep 2020 – Aug 2022 | Real-estate platform for home buyers and financial advisors. There from the early days until the founders' exit. |
| Brewin Dolphin (acquired by RBC) | Senior Front-End Engineer | Feb 2020 – Jul 2022 | Private wealth management firm. Digital transformation. |
| SmartXpo (Plural Strategy) | Front-End Lead | Jun 2018 – Mar 2020 | B2B SaaS pricing-analytics platform for the exhibition industry. Alpha to MVP and beta. |
| portmone.com.ua | Front-End Lead | Dec 2017 – Jun 2018 | Payment gateway with 3.6m+ monthly visits. B2B rewrite. |
| avionix.eu | Full-Stack Engineer | Jan 2017 – Aug 2017 | Healthcare prototype. Prototype that unlocked funding. |
| Freelance, startup and small projects | Full-Stack Engineer | Jan 2014 – Jan 2018 | Freelance and early-stage projects. B2B and B2C products. |

## Connect

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniil-kutsyna/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/username255)
- [Email](mailto:daniil.kutsyna@gmail.com)
- [CV (PDF)](https://daniilkutsyna.com/cv__daniil_kutsyna.pdf)
- [CV (Markdown)](https://daniilkutsyna.com/cv.md)
- [CV (JSON Resume)](https://daniilkutsyna.com/resume.json)