Lead Software Engineer

Numerai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

Job summary

Numerai is building a self-improving hedge fund and forming a new team to create AI that performs quant research autonomously. You will own the data platform, the research platform, and the trading pipeline that turns models into daily positions.

You will set the engineering bar, review designs, and ensure the reliability of a live trading system. You will work directly with the founder on strategic compute allocation and how to achieve more alpha per engineer, with significant equity on offer.

Qualifications

• 7+ years engineering with production ownership at top-tier quant trading firms.
• Deep systems knowledge across infra, ML, CI/CD, ETL.
• Fluent in Python; comfortable with systems languages when needed.
• Proven track record designing scalable systems others will adopt.
• Excellent written communication; can justify hard technical tradeoffs.
• Extreme ownership; no task is beneath you and outages are yours.
• Judgment about scope; avoid overbuilding and identify critical paths.

Responsibilities

• Own the data platform, research platform, and trading pipeline.
• Review designs, reduce complexity, and decide build vs buy vs ignore.
• Be personally accountable for reliability of a live trading system.
• Work directly with the founder on technical strategy and compute budget.
• Set engineering bar and continuously raise it.

Skills

7+ years experience

Production ownership

Python fluent

Distributed systems

Excellent communication

Extreme ownership

Scope judgment

ML deployment familiarity

Job description

Numerai is building a self-improving hedge fund.

We run an institutional quant fund built from thousands of machine learning models. Increasingly, those models are built by AI, not people. This isn't a thesis we're pitching. It's already how Numerai gets smarter every day (see https://numer.ai).

The next step is to compound it. Numerai is forming a new team with one mandate: build AI that does quant research autonomously, all the time. Discover new features, build better risk models, improve how the fund turns thousands of signals into a portfolio.

Numerai is a small company with an unusual amount of leverage per person. No bureaucracy, no politics. Significant equity.

The Role

You own the entire technical surface of the team: the data platform that ingests all of the information in the world, the research platform our quants and AI systems run on, and the trading pipeline that turns the Meta Model into positions in the market every day.

You will set the engineering bar and then keep raising it. Reviewing designs, killing complexity, deleting systems, and making the calls about what we build versus buy versus ignore. You will be personally accountable for the reliability of a live trading system where a silent failure is a real loss.

You will work directly with the founder on technical strategy: where the compute budget goes, which research directions get platform support, and how we get more alpha per engineer than firms with a hundred times the headcount.

Requirements

• 7+ years of engineering at top-tier quantitative trading firms, with real production ownership of research or trading infrastructure
• Deep systems knowledge across the technology stack - infra, ML, CI/CD, ETL - and you engineer systems from first principles
• Fluent in Python, and comfortable dropping into a systems language when the profiler says to
• A track record of designing systems that other strong engineers were happy to work in years later
• Excellent written communication (design docs, specs, post-mortems). You can make a hard technical tradeoff legible to a non-engineer
• Extreme ownership. No task is beneath you and no outage is someone else's problem
• Judgment about scope: you've seen how big firms overbuild, and you know which of their practices are load-bearing and which are theater

Nice to have

• Experience with ML training and deployment at scale
• Exposure to global equity trading, execution, or portfolio management systems
• Experience being the technical center of gravity on a team of fewer than 20 people