Applied AI Engineer - NYC Prop Trading Firm - Tier 1 Firm

About the Role

The Applied AI Engineer turns research and off-the-shelf models into systems the business actually runs on, pricing, risk, research workflows, or internal tooling. If a model ships but never gets integrated into a real workflow, it doesn't matter how good it is; this role is the difference between a promising prototype and something a portfolio manager touches every day.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship production AI features end to end, from model selection through integration and monitoring
• Fine-tune and evaluate LLMs and other models against real business tasks, not generic benchmarks
• Build the evaluation harnesses and guardrails needed to trust a model's output in a production setting
• Work directly with researchers, PMs, and engineers to translate a vague idea into a shipped tool
• Own the full lifecycle of what you build: performance, cost, reliability, and iteration

Must-haves

• 3+ years shipping production software, with hands-on experience building applied AI or ML-backed features, not just research notebooks. This is non-negotiable for the role
• Strong Python and solid engineering fundamentals: testing, version control, code review
• Practical experience with LLM APIs, fine-tuning, or retrieval-augmented systems
• Comfortable owning a project from ambiguous spec to production

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a regulated or high-stakes environment (finance, healthcare) where correctness and auditability matter
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, or agentic workflows
• Prior exposure to a quant or trading environment
• Open-source contributions or public writing on applied AI work

Why This Role

This is a seat where the work ships fast and gets used immediately, not a research role that ends at a slide deck. The team is small enough that one engineer's judgment on what to build, and what not to, actually shapes the roadmap.