Principal AI Software Engineer - Core Systems

Firm: Top-performing New York Hedge Fund

Role: Principal AI Software Engineer - Core Systems

Tech Stack: Python, C++/Java, AWS, GCP, Kafka, ClickHouse, Kubernetes, MLOps

Compensation: $225,000-$300,000 base + bonus

Location: NYC (Hybrid - 4 days in-office, relocation available)

About the Company

We are partnered with one of the top-performing hedge funds globally, building out a new Central AI Engineering group responsible for the core infrastructure behind firm-wide AI research and trading systems.

About the Role

This is a principal-level hire - a senior technical leader who will operate as a right hand to the Head of AI Engineering, owning architectural decisions and shaping the long-term direction of AI systems across the firm. This is not a research role. It is deeply hands-on, systems-focused engineering at scale.

Responsibilities

• Architecting and building distributed systems that power AI-driven research and trading platforms

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• Designing infrastructure for large-scale model training, orchestration, and low-latency inference
• Optimizing system performance under strict latency and reliability constraints
• Establishing engineering standards across ML infrastructure, deployment, and observability
• Partnering directly with researchers, data scientists, and trading teams to productionize AI

Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant system design ownership
• Strong Python plus deep expertise in C++ or Java
• Proven experience architecting distributed systems at scale (high QPS, low latency environments preferred)
• Experience designing or operating ML infrastructure, model serving platforms, or data-intensive systems
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, and messaging/data systems such as Kafka, ClickHouse, or Postgres
• Ability to think critically about trade-offs, failure modes, and long-term architecture
• Experience in finance is helpful but not required. Experience building production AI systems is essential.

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Required Skills

• Strong Python plus deep expertise in C++ or Java
• Proven experience in architecting distributed systems at scale
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, and messaging/data systems

Preferred Skills

• Experience in finance is helpful but not required
• Experience building production AI systems is essential

If you’re a systems-focused AI engineer who enjoys building durable, high-performance infrastructure and shaping technical direction at scale, this is a rare opportunity to do so inside one of the most ambitious AI buildouts in finance.

Apply to learn more about the role and team.