Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI Engineer | AI/Crypto Fintech | Seed Stage Confidential Client | Backed by Tier-1 Crypto VCs Location: Americas preferred (US > Canada/LatAm) | Remote Compensation: $175,000–$250,000 USD base + 1% equity + team bonuses + pro-rata 2026 token launch participation Stage: Seed | ~20 employees About the Company A well-funded seed-stage startup building the next generation of autonomous trading technology. Backed by leading crypto-focused venture capital, the company has driven significant trading volume with zero paid acquisition and strong retention metrics. The founding team are crypto and onchain veterans with a prior unicorn venture. The platform is a purpose-built execution system for AI agents operating with real capital around the clock — the infrastructure, data pipelines, and runtime are already in production. You are building the intelligence layer on top of it. The Problem You're Solving A fleet of autonomous trading agents runs 24/7, generating a continuous stream of decisions and measurable outcomes. Right now those agents are effective but isolated — when one finds a winning pattern, a human has to carry that insight to the rest. Your job is to make that process autonomous: build the system where the fleet learns from itself and improves continuously without human intervention. What You'll Own Learning System & RL Loop (~70%) Design and implement the pipeline that connects live trade outcomes back to strategy improvement — signal quality, position sizing, timing, risk parameters Build the evaluation framework that separates genuine predictive signal from noise across agents, market conditions, and configurations Automate the strategy generation and testing cycle — the system should explore new configurations, validate them against real fleet data, and surface deployment candidates Detect regime shifts in market conditions and adapt fleet behavior accordingly Decompose every trade into its component drivers — signal quality, execution efficiency, exit timing — and wire those attributions back into strategy design Manage fleet-level coordination: concentration risk, capital allocation, and the exploration vs. exploitation balance Build the telemetry and data capture layer that makes all of the above possible Model & Inference Infrastructure (~30%) Own the build-vs-buy decision on model hosting — evaluate proxied external APIs versus fine-tuned models on owned infrastructure and execute the chosen path Determine whether domain-specific training on trading data meaningfully outperforms prompted general-purpose models — then build the pipeline to act on that answer Optimize inference for the specific demands of a large autonomous agent fleet: concurrent agents, structured outputs, cost efficiency at scale Build the agent telemetry layer capturing every decision, signal score, and evaluation across the fleet What You Need A production closed-loop system — model outputs drove real-world actions, outcomes were measured, and that feedback automatically improved the next decision. Not a batch retrain. Not a dashboard with manual follow-through. A live, wired loop. Practical RL or online learning experience — you understand the challenges of learning from real-world feedback rather than static datasets Full-stack ML ownership — you build the pipeline, deploy the model, and own the outcome; Python primary, comfortable with Go or TypeScript in production services High-stakes sequential decision-making domain experience — finance preferred but not required; robotics, autonomous vehicles, game AI, ad bidding, and supply chain all transfer Nice to Have LLM fine-tuning and open-source model serving in production (vLLM, TGI, PEFT/LoRA) Multi-agent system design Financial ML — signal generation, execution optimization, portfolio construction Onchain or DeFi experience Interview Process Fast — target first call to offer within two weeks Intro call with founders (60 min) — fit, motivation, your closed-loop experience Technical deep-dive (60 min) — open-ended system design, no right answer, evaluating how you think Paid trial project (1 week, part-time) if needed — real problem, compensated Compensation The base pay range for this role is $175,000 – $200,000 per year.