Job Description

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll build complete systems that solve real problems for institutional investors. You'll sit with customers to understand their workflows, then implement agentic AI systems that integrate with their proprietary data. This means building data pipelines, designing evaluation frameworks, and iterating on what's working in production.

You'll operate like a founder: take ownership, move fast, and figure it out. Whether that's jumping on a client call to understand risk workflows or writing an integration to connect data sources, you make it happen. You'll travel to customer sites, work alongside portfolio managers and analysts, and push solutions forward.

This role requires strong backend engineering combined with product thinking and customer empathy. You'll work with PhD researchers and a proven executive team solving problems that haven't been solved before. You need to be comfortable in ambiguity, technical enough to build production systems, and collaborative enough to translate customer needs into working solutions.

The right person thrives on customer interaction, builds backend systems from scratch, and wants to see their work impact billion-dollar decisions.

Duties

• Collaborate with institutional investors and research scientists to understand requirements and pain points, then own end-to-end technical implementation of agentic AI systems from prototype to production, including deployment, monitoring, and customer-driven iteration

• Ship code and documentation that meets the highest engineering standards for systems handling billion-dollar decisions

• Drive continuous improvement of system design and deployment processes, identifying bottlenecks and scaling challenges before they become problems

Requirements

• Relentlessness and customer focus, in large quantities

• Demonstrable clarity of thought

• 5+ years as a software engineer, preferably with a focus on backend systems and data infrastructure

• Proven ability to ship production-grade applications in languages such as Python, Java, C++, Go, and Rust, and using agentic tools to modify customer frontends

• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholder groups, including non-technicians

• B.A./B.S. in Computer Science or a related technical field

• Willingness and enthusiasm for customer travel - this role requires on-site engagement to understand customer requirements and invent with customers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building LLM systems and agentic workflows: RAG, tool use, multi-step reasoning, evaluation frameworks

• Foundational AI/ML knowledge: You understand how modern generative AI works, even if you're not a researcher

• Startup or founding experience: You've operated in ambiguity and built systems from scratch before

We expect that strong candidates won't necessarily meet every qualification above. If most of this resonates and the gaps feel learnable, we'd rather hear from you than not.

"Friends of Rational Dynamics" Candidate Referral Program

If you have a great candidate in mind for this role and would like to have the potential to earn $7,500 to $15,000 if your referred candidate is successfully hired and employed by Rational Dynamics, please use this form to submit your referral. For more details regarding eligibility, terms and conditions please make sure to review the Rational Dynamics Referral Bonus Program.