Founding AI Engineering Lead - Equities

Founding AI Engineering Lead - Equities

Boutique Investment Management Firm

Location: Manhattan, NY (Hybrid)

A leading, highly capitalized boutique investment management firm in Manhattan is seeking a Founding AI Engineering Lead to partner directly with a senior equities Portfolio Manager to build a next-generation research and decision-making platform. This is not a traditional ML role or back-office data function either. The mandate is to design and own an AI-native research production system, enabling a small, high-performing team to evaluate more opportunities faster and with a consistently higher bar for insight and rigor. You will operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and investment workflows, acting as both technical architect and product owner to define how modern AI systems reshape the end-to-end investment process. This is a foundational hire, offering significant autonomy, direct impact on capital allocation, and full ownership across architecture, tooling, and roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Reimagine research workflows Replace manual, fragmented processes with AI-native systems that accelerate idea generation, analysis, and decision-making.
• Build production-grade AI applications: Design and deploy internal tools that synthesize large volumes of structured and unstructured data into actionable insights.
• Own modeling and data systems: Transition core analytical workflows into scalable, programmatic systems with real-time data integration and intuitive user interfaces.
• Develop agentic workflows Build AI-driven systems capable of independently executing research tasks, gathering, structuring, and synthesizing information across multiple sources.
• Drive rapid iteration: Continuously ship high-impact tools with tight feedback loops, optimizing for reduced analyst time and improved decision quality.
• Define distribution and UX: Ensure insights are delivered in the right formats (dashboards, digests, integrations) to drive immediate usability in the investment process.
• Establish engineering standards Set best practices across reliability, monitoring, security, and data governance, ensuring production-grade outputs.

Key Skills & Experience

• Minimum 5+ YOE in Software Engineering role
• Strong experience in C# and/or Python-based system design, particularly within data-intensive or research-driven environments
• Proven track record of building production-grade platforms, not just prototypes
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, or applied AI systems in real-world use cases
• Ability to operate across engineering, product, and user-facing workflows, with a bias toward ownership
• Demonstrated ability to scope, build, and ship quickly in ambiguous, high-autonomy environments
• Structured thinking around system design, data modeling, and workflow optimization
• Exposure to financial markets is a plus, but not required; curiosity around investing and decision-making is essential

Profile:

• Builder mentality with a strong preference for shipping over theorizing
• Comfortable acting as the sole technical owner in a greenfield environment
• Motivated by leverage, impact, and real-world outcomes rather than process or scale for its own sake
• Interested in applying AI to economically meaningful problems

Compensation

Base salary for this role is likely to fall somewhere between $200,000-250,000 plus discretionary bonus, incentives and full benefits