Applied AI · Financial Markets · London

Applied AI for firms that move real money.

I build and ship AI systems inside hedge funds and buy-side firms — agentic workflows, research copilots, and production pipelines that survive contact with a trading floor. 15+ years across Credit Suisse, Elliott, LMR Partners.

Previously
Elliott Management LMR Partners Daiwa Capital Markets Credit Suisse
01 — Services

Three ways to work together.

I

AI Engineering Sprint

A focused 4–6 week engagement to design, prototype and ship a production-ready AI system inside your firm. Research copilots, earnings pipelines, reconciliation agents, risk workflows.

Best for
  • Hedge funds piloting AI
  • PM teams, risk, research
  • From zero to deployed
II

Agentic Architecture Review

A structured audit of your existing AI initiatives — evaluation rigour, hallucination containment, security posture, production readiness. Delivered as a written assessment with prioritised recommendations.

Best for
  • Teams already building
  • Pre-production sanity check
  • CTO-level reporting
III

Advisory & Expert Calls

Ongoing advisory retainers or one-off expert sessions. I help teams navigate vendor selection, build-vs-buy decisions, and the specific failure modes of LLMs in regulated environments.

Best for
  • Investment committees
  • Early-stage AI teams
  • GLG-style consultations
02 — Selected Work

Systems, shipped.

A small selection of recent projects. Production systems at previous employers are described at the boundary of what I can share publicly.

Founding · 2024→

Fortius Technology

Co-founder and CTO of a SaaS club management platform. Designed the full stack end-to-end — auth, membership, bookings, billing — and took it from sketch to paying customers while holding a day job.

C# (.NET 8)ReactAWSPostgres
Research Pipeline

Earnings Analyst Agent

A multi-stage agentic pipeline that ingests earnings calls and SEC filings, extracts structured facts, and produces analyst-grade briefs. Built with rigorous evaluation — 75/75 facts verified, zero hallucinations.

PythonLangGraphEvalsClaude
Risk & P&L

Production Risk Infrastructure

Led development of real-time risk and P&L systems at LMR Partners and Elliott Management. VaR engines, OMS integration, Pre/Post-trade processing and Compliance workflows, distributed compute — the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps a multi-billion dollar fund running.

JavaC# (.NET)PythonClickhouseSQL ServerAWSDistributed systems
03 — Writing

Agentic Engineering.

Substack
Agentic
Engineering.
Ahmed El-Refee → Subscribe

I write about building AI systems for serious production environments — financial services in particular, but the principles travel. Evaluation discipline, architecture patterns, and the gap between LLM demos and systems that actually hold.

  • Recent Why Claude Skills change the monorepo conversation
  • Essay DDD for agentic systems — bounded contexts in an agent world
  • Case study Building evals that survive production
  • Opinion The unglamorous middle of the AI stack
Read & subscribe
04 — About

Fifteen years, one thesis.

I've spent my career at the intersection of engineering and financial markets — building the systems that price, manage risk, and reconcile real capital at serious firms.

My thesis for this decade is simple: AI is about to reshape how the buy-side works, but only where it's built with the same rigour we apply to any other production system. That's the work I want to do, and the bar I hold myself to.

I'm based in London, BEng Computing from Imperial College. Outside work I play squash, and drink more specialty coffee than is probably advisable.

2024 — Present
Co-founder & CTO
Fortius Technology
2024 — 2026
Senior Developer, Risk
LMR Partners
2021 — 2024
Senior Developer, Special Situations
Elliott Advisors London
2020 — 2022
Founder
IndyAlerts — trading alerts platform
2014 — 2020
Tech Lead, Credit Risk
Daiwa Capital Markets
2012 — 2014
eTrading Engineer
Credit Suisse — FX Forwards & Fixed Income
05 — Get in touch

Let's build something that holds up.

If you're leading an AI initiative at a hedge fund, buy-side firm or applied-AI company — or weighing whether to start one — I'd like to hear about it. The best fit is usually a 30-minute conversation first.