Founding Software Engineer

Continual Research Inc

$150K — $250K *
Finance & Insurance
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 2-5 years experience in early-stage tech startups (preferably in AI or fintech) or at quant funds
  • Proven experience in building production systems like distributed pipelines and data platforms
  • Strong familiarity with AI tools and critical view on automated code generation
  • Ability to create and iterate on systems amidst ambiguity
  • Team-oriented mindset with a focus on high standards and fast execution

Responsibilities

  • Establish foundational infrastructure for research and trading systems
  • Develop essential tools for agent performance and safety
  • Ensure system reliability and monitor for operational failures
  • Make data management a priority with robust ingestion and validation processes
  • Implement engineering practices suitable for AI-native codebases
  • Collaborate closely with researchers to refine and deploy strategies

Benefits

  • Generous equity in the company
  • Company-subsidized health insurance (medical, vision, dental)
  • HSA, FSA, and 401(k) plans provided
  • Regular wellness and learning subsidies
  • Commuter subsidies
Full Job Description
The Role

You will engineer the systems powering the core agentic research layer, the automated trading system, and the world's best data registry for alpha research. We're an AI-native company, so we're interested in people who can design systems at different levels of abstraction. You should be comfortable building both the system and the system that builds the system. You should have a clear view of how the team can keep the system durable when code can be generated without supervision at superhuman speeds (and we'll ask you what it is!).

As a member of the founding team, you'll directly impact every level of the business, from product strategy to team culture.

What you'll do
  • Stand up core infrastructure from scratch: experiment execution environments, compute orchestration, storage, observability, and the deployment pipeline that moves research into production.
  • Build the tooling that agents depend on: sandboxed code execution, data access layers, backtest engines, and interfaces that make agents productive rather than dangerous.
  • Own reliability in production. Design the monitoring, alerting, and failure recovery for systems where mistakes cost real money.
  • Make data a first-class product: ingestion from messy vendor feeds, validation, versioning, point-in-time correctness, and fast discovery for both humans and agents.
  • Establish the engineering practices of an AI-native codebase: harnesses, evals, CI, and review processes that let generated code ship fast without rotting the system.
  • Work directly with researchers and quants, shortening the loop from idea to running experiment to deployed strategy.


What we're looking for
  • 2-5 years of experience building and shipping at an early-stage tech startup (ideally in AI or fintech, especially trading or investments) or at a quant fund
  • Strong track record building production systems: distributed pipelines, data platforms, low-latency services, or infrastructure for ML and agentic workloads.
  • You use AI heavily in your own work and have formed opinions from it. You know where generated code is leverage and where it's liability, and you can articulate how a small team keeps a fast-growing codebase coherent.
  • You default to shipping. Given ambiguity, you produce a working system and iterate, rather than waiting for requirements to firm up.
  • Low ego, high standards, fast execution.


Compensation
  • Salary of $150,000/year to $250,000/year
  • Generous equity in the company
  • Company-subsidized health insurance including medical, vision, and dental
  • HSA, FSA, dependent care FSA, and 401(k) plans provided
  • Regular wellness, commuter and learning subsidies


We are a small founding team with unusually deep experience across machine learning, hedge fund technology, and investment management. We recently raised a $10M seed round from leading investors in AI and fintech. Join part of our founding team to build the future of investing!

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