AI & Automation Lead (f/m/x)

About lemon.markets 🍋 We grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses, providing seamless access to capital markets. We enable everyone to be an investor. lemon.markets builds infrastructure for financial services and technology companies powering the next generation of investment products. From enabling a FinTech to launch their first investment product, over allowing e.g. a Neobank to embed investing into their product to bringing investing into a completely new context. Our API-first infrastructure makes launching an investment product customer-centric and compliant. We abstract all complexity for our partners through a well documented API, a self-service customer operations portal and operating in a clear regulatory framework. Enabling partners to launch in weeks, not months. We have experienced first hand that brokerage infrastructure is broken. Building an investment product used to be highly expensive, challenging and cumbersome. We ease this pain by shielding our partners & their customers from the underlying complexity - and with that we make investing more accessible to everyone. Because that’s exactly what we enjoy, going to places nobody else dares and solving hard problems. This not only creates tons of value when done right, but attracts the smartest minds - because outlier companies are built by exceptional (& diverse) people like you. Your Mission: As AI & Automation Lead, you will establish and lead lemon.markets’ first dedicated AI function, making AI a safe, practical and measurable part of how the whole company works. Reporting directly to the VP Engineering and operating across the first line, you will identify high-value opportunities across Engineering, Finance, Operations, Compliance, Product, Sales, Partner Management and People and turn them into solutions that improve efficiency without compromising quality or control. You will build on the foundations already being established, including a governed AI platform, an inventory of current use cases and an initial risk assessment aligned with the EU AI Act. A key part of your role will be creating the standards, measurement framework and decision processes that determine which use cases are scaled, improved or stopped. Working closely with Engineering, Finance, Risk Management and Compliance, you will balance innovation with data protection, operational resilience, cost discipline and regulatory expectations. This is your opportunity to shape how a regulated financial company adopts AI responsibly, while building a function that leaves lasting capability across the organisation. In this role you will • Lead the AI function and work with department heads across lemon.markets to identify, prioritise and deliver use cases that create measurable business value beyond Engineering. • Build a transparent, evidence-based portfolio of AI initiatives with business owners, baselines, success metrics and appropriate guardrails, ensuring that promising ideas become sustainable improvements. • Enable teams across the company to use AI effectively themselves by developing practical workflows, guidance and capabilities that reduce manual effort without creating dependency on the AI function. • Set the standards for our governed AI platform with Engineering, including model selection, evaluation, access controls, data protection, human approval points and reliable fallback processes. • Partner with Risk Management, Compliance and Finance to ensure AI use cases meet regulatory expectations, remain within agreed risk and cost boundaries, and receive the appropriate independent review and sign-off. • Establish a measurement framework that connects efficiency gains to quality, risk and customer outcomes, enabling clear decisions about when to s