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Tipalti, an AI-powered finance automation platform, is seeking a Principal, AI Transformation to join its internal AI Foundry team. You will drive Tipalti's AI-led operational transformation across General & Administrative functions—Legal, People, and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)—serving as a full-time embedded partner within these organizations.
In this role, you will identify pain points and inefficiencies within Legal, People, and Finance functions, mapping end-to-end workflows to understand handoff failures and where AI can create leverage across boundaries. You will prototype and deploy solutions using approved LLMs (Claude and other AI tools), agent frameworks, MCP-based tooling, automation platforms, APIs, data integrations, and code where appropriate, while adhering to Tipalti's security, privacy, legal, compliance, architecture, and change-management requirements.
You will maintain an evidence-based view of what is buildable internally versus what requires external solutions, providing build-vs-buy guidance that addresses security, privacy, intellectual property, regulatory, data residency, vendor concentration, resilience, auditability, maintenance, and exit risks. You will advise divisional teams on their respective tech stacks—what to keep, consolidate, and retire—with a clear point of view on how the stack fits together, where data lives, integration seams, ownership, and where agents or automation can sit across tools.
Designing for reliability over demos, you will think in failure modes: where models might be wrong, how to detect issues, what evaluation looks like, where human oversight belongs, and how sensitive data is handled. You will build in access controls, testing, bias and accuracy assessment, logging, audit trails, monitoring, escalation, rollback, incident response, and business continuity. Each solution should be treated as a product for internal customers, with success, risk, control, and compliance metrics defined before building. You will track adoption, performance, control effectiveness, and incidents on a regular cadence, iterating based on actual usage.
Tipalti is the AI-powered platform for finance automation, serving over 5,000 global companies across accounts payable, global payouts, procurement, employee expenses, corporate cards, supplier management, tax compliance, and treasury. The company partners with leading financial institutions including Citi, Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, and Visa, enabling payments across 200+ countries and territories in 120 currencies. Founded in Israel in 2010, Tipalti is headquartered in Foster City, CA, with offices in Tel Aviv, Plano, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Amsterdam, Tbilisi, and Medellin.
**Requirements:**
- You build things hands-on: shipped AI or automation solutions that real people depend on (agents, workflow automations, integrations, internal tools). Comfortable in a terminal, reading API documentation, and writing/debugging scripts in Python, TypeScript, or similar. Understand the difference between "demo'd once" and "actually used."
- Fluent with Claude: built with Claude or an equivalent frontier model in earnest (agentic coding, sub-agents and skills, MCP, context and prompt design, evaluating output quality). Can adapt quickly as approved tools change. Know what these systems are bad at: non-determinism, context limits, cost and latency, and when retrieval, tooling, or a plain script beats a model call.
- Think in end-to-end workflows, not silos: trace work across functions and systems. Notice handoffs, redundancy, and instances where different parts of the org solve the same problem twice. See inefficiency as a systems problem.
- Proactive and self-directed: find problems before they're on your list. Comfortable setting your own priorities and making day-to-day calls. Keep moving between syncs.
- Comfortable at all levels of the org: sit with frontline teams and understand their workflow. Sit with CFO, CLRO, and CPO and speak credibly to strategy. Sit with engineers and translate business problems into technical specs.
- Translator and connector: turn vague asks into working solutions. Spot where one function has solved a problem that another hasn't. Tell leaders "not that, but here's what would actually help." See patterns across domains and connect the dots.
- Curious about unfamiliar territory: genuinely interested in how these functions work. Comfortable asking "stupid questions" to understand actual workflows. Able to pick up domain language quickly.
