Front Office AI Engineer - Trader-Focused, Production-Ready

BlueCrest Capital Management; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

BlueCrest Capital Management is seeking an experienced software engineer to join the AI Team within Front Office Technology. You will build production-grade AI applications and integrate with traders and quants to enable safe AI use in a regulated trading environment.

You will design scalable solutions, ship APIs and containers, and push for governance, entitlements, and operational handover across teams, while collaborating closely with PMs and developers to deliver tangible business value.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software engineering, with strong Python and SQL.
• Direct front office experience at a hedge fund or bank, working day to day with traders or PMs, ideally in Rates or Emerging Markets.
• Hands-on experience building LLM applications: retrieval (RAG), tool use and agents, context engineering, and evaluation of output quality.
• Heavy daily use of agentic coding tools, with a clear view of where they fail and how to review their output.
• A track record of shipping production systems: APIs, containers, CI/CD and cloud (Azure or Kubernetes preferred).
• The ability to turn loosely defined desk requests into scoped deliverables, and the confidence to push back when something should not be built.

Responsibilities

• Embedded delivery: Scope pod use cases that need engineering build, working directly with PMs, traders and quants.
• Build production-grade applications using AI-assisted development on the firm’s standard AI tooling: templates, CI/CD, the Institutional Knowledge Layer, MCP services and shared libraries.
• Pair with pod developers on live builds, sharing good practice in design, code review, testing and safe use of agentic coding tools.
• Leave the pod able to extend and maintain what has been built, rather than dependent on you.
• Turn repeated pod requirements into reusable MCP servers, skills, agents and templates, available for use across the firm.
• Feed engineering gaps and requirements directly into the team’s roadmap.
• Build entitlements, per-user identity, audit and evaluation into every solution from day one.
• Take successful applications through graduation to Technology ownership, including evals, documentation and operational handover.
• Assist in tracking the business impact of what you deliver: time saved, risk reduced, decisions supported.

Job description

BlueCrest Capital Management is seeking an experienced software engineer to join the AI Team within Front Office Technology. You will build production-grade AI applications and integrate with traders and quants to enable safe AI use in a regulated trading environment.

You will design scalable solutions, ship APIs and containers, and push for governance, entitlements, and operational handover across teams, while collaborating closely with PMs and developers to deliver tangible business value.