Domain Expert, Financial Services

Sycamore Labs, Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Meaningful equity

Job summary

Sycamore Labs, Inc. is seeking a senior domain expert in financial services to drive deployment specifications for enterprise agents. You will pair with Applied AI engineers, delivering precise workflow definitions, rules, and thresholds while guiding regulatory and control framing.

You will engage with customer operators and leadership throughout deployments. The role emphasizes accuracy, industry expertise, and the ability to translate complex processes into production-ready specifications

Qualifications

• 10+ years in financial services with governance or operations exposure.
• Executive presence and ability to lead conversations with operators and leadership.
• Familiarity with modern AI systems and where they help or mislead.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the domain authority on customer deployments from discovery through production.
• Translate real operational processes into precise specifications for build: decision points, roles, rules, thresholds, and evidence.
• Supply and maintain the rule corpus and mark which decisions must never be automated.
• Define what correct output looks like and calibrate agent quality against real cases.
• Own the regulatory and control framing: applicable requirements, authorities, and evidence.
• Build trust with customer operators, executives, and control functions.
• Feed patterns back to Product and Core AI to shape platform capabilities.

Skills

10+ years in financial services

Executive presence

AI-native

Automation judgment

Job description

Bring deep financial services expertise into the room where enterprise agents get designed, and turn it into specifications engineers can build the same week.

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

The role

The hardest part of deploying an agent into an enterprise workflow is almost never the model. It is knowing what the workflow actually is: who decides what, under whose authority, against which rules, with what evidence, and what happens when the answer is wrong. That knowledge lives in people who have done the work, and you are one of them.

You will pair directly with our Applied AI engineers on customer deployments. They build; you supply the substance that makes what they build correct. Your output is not advice or a slide. It is a specification precise enough to become a workflow definition, a rule set, a review screen, and a set of thresholds, followed by the judgment of whether what came back is actually right, which is a different question from whether it runs. You will be in front of customers throughout.

Financial services at Sycamore

Banking, capital markets, and specialty lending run enormous volumes of document-heavy, judgment-heavy, and heavily governed work. Client onboarding and periodic review. Sanctions and transaction-alert triage. Credit analysis and investment memo preparation. Collateral and title verification. Model risk documentation. Vendor and third-party risk review. Regulatory examination evidence.

Almost all of it has the shape our platform is built for: extract the facts with citations, apply the deterministic rules, route the ambiguous middle to a person with the right authority, and leave a record that survives examination.

What these firms will not do is adopt something they cannot explain to a regulator. That constraint is where your expertise matters most.

What you will do

• Serve as the domain authority on customer deployments in your industry, from discovery through production.
• Translate real operational processes into specifications precise enough to build from: decision points, roles and authority, rules, thresholds, escalation, and evidence requirements.
• Supply and maintain the rule corpus a workflow applies, and mark clearly which decisions must never be automated.
• Define what correct output looks like, and act as the calibration source when we evaluate agent quality against real cases.
• Own the regulatory and control framing: which requirements apply, which body asks, and what evidence satisfies them.
• Build trust with customer operators, executives, and control functions as someone who has done their job.
• Feed patterns back to Product and Core AI so that what we learn in one deployment becomes a platform capability rather than a repeated conversation.
• Help our commercial team evaluate which opportunities in your industry are real and which are not.

What we are looking for

• 10+ years in financial services, in a role where you owned or governed the actual process: operations, credit, compliance, risk, audit, or a front-office function with real accountability.
• Fluency with the control environment: model risk management, examination and audit, information barriers, third-party risk, and record retention.
• Direct experience with the operational reality of at least one of: client onboarding and periodic review, credit or investment analysis, financial crime and sanctions operations, or regulatory reporting.
• The ability to write a process down precisely, clearly enough that an engineer can build from your account of a workflow’s decision points, authority limits, and exception paths.
• Judgment about automation. You know which parts of your domain are genuinely rule-based, which require expertise, and which should never be delegated to software at all.
• Executive presence and high EQ. You can be the credible voice with a customer's operators and their leadership in the same conversation.
• Intellectual honesty. You will sometimes need to tell us that something we built is wrong, or that a customer's request is a bad idea.
• AI-native. You use modern AI systems in your own work and can reason about where they help and where they mislead.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity, broad ownership, and regular customer travel.

You do not need to be technical in the software sense. You do need to be precise, and you need to be genuinely curious about how the system works.

• A 30-minute introductory conversation.
• Two 60-minute conversations, one on the operational depth of your domain and one on how you would specify a workflow for a build team.
• A working session where you take a real process from your industry, specify it end to end, and defend the decisions you made about authority, thresholds, and what should not be automated.
• Put deep domain expertise directly into production software rather than into recommendations.
• Work alongside engineers who will build what you specify, in the same week.
• Define how agents handle consequential work in an industry you know well.
• Sit at the front of a category that is still being defined, with real influence over what gets built.
• Join early enough to shape how Sycamore approaches your industry.
• Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build.

Hard problems, real impact

Trust architectures, memory systems, multi-agent coordination. The foundational layer that makes agentic apps work in production.

Small team, high ownership

Every engineer shapes the product and the culture. No layers of process between you and the work that matters.

Backed by the best

$65M from Coatue, Lightspeed, Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, and notable industry angels.

Grow with us

Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a genuine focus on your growth as the company scales.