AI Product Engineer – Venture Studio (Startup Incubator)

OVERVIEW:

The D. E. Shaw group seeks a pragmatic, engineering-oriented AI technical product manager to join its DESCOvery team’s venture studio. The DESCOvery team ideates, researches, and builds innovative, technology-driven businesses, with a growing focus on leveraging AI to address real-world business challenges. This hands-on, high-autonomy role offers the chance to transform business needs into working prototypes, internal tools, and lightweight products that deliver immediate impact in a collaborative and engaging work environment.

WHAT YOU’LL DO DAY-TO-DAY:

• Partner with internal leads to translate business pain points into actionable technical solution paths.
• Prototype solutions using tools and technologies such as OpenAI APIs,
• LangChain, Llama Index, vector DBs, and orchestration frameworks.
• Develop simple, user-friendly front-ends to demonstrate product viability.
• Collaborate with engineers and external vendors to evolve prototypes into robust MVPs ready for broader adoption.
• Work across multiple problem areas—including internal tools, process automation, and workflow enhancements—supporting both DESCOvery and portfolio companies.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

• A bachelor’s degree or higher is required, as is an impressive record of academic and professional achievement.
• Three to six years of relevant experience, including at least two years developing technology products alongside development teams and at least one year building workflow products that support business activities and processes.
• Excellent intuition for creatively applying LLMs and modern AI tools to solve business problems, with comfort using off-the-shelf components, open-source tools, and APIs, and a drive to keep up with emerging AI/ML technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to translate vague or high-level prompts into scoped plans and working solutions with minimal oversight; experience shipping code or working closely with developers in high-trust environments is essential.
• Experience in startups, internal tools, R&D, or skunkworks-style teams is a plus; individuals who have leveraged LLMs to build features, tools, or products independently, thrive in zero-to-one contexts (MVPs, early-stage startups), and enjoy acting as a translator between businesses and technical teams will excel in this role.
• The expected annual base salary for this position is $185,000 to $230,0000. Our compensation and benefits package includes variable compensation in the form of a year-end bonus, guaranteed in the first year of hire, and benefits including medical and prescription drug coverage, 401(k) contribution matching, wellness reimbursement, family building benefits, and a charitable gift match program.