Founding Software Engineer

About the roleMost job posts are designed to collect as many applications as possible. This is not one of them. At Simplify, we work directly with startup founders to help them hire for high-priority roles. We’re partnering with an AI research lab and trading firm in Palo Alto to hire Founding Members of Technical Staff — exceptional early-career engineers and quantitative developers who want to build the systems, signals, and infrastructure behind a new trading firm. $180–250k base, and they’re hiring multiple engineers now. About the companyOne-liner: Building intelligence systems for live markets — and deploying them first through its own quantitative hedge fund Stage: $29M seed round led by Ribbit Capital, with backing from Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, the founder of DRW, the CEO of Kalshi, and founders of DoorDash and Ramp. Small founding team, in person in Palo Alto. The team includes former xAI and Citadel talent, IMO medalists, and highly ranked crypto and Polymarket traders. Its research lab develops AI systems for market prediction, initially deployed through an eight-figure internal hedge fund anchored by the founder of IMC Trading. The work spans research, systems, and product: pioneering what new technology makes possible, building the infrastructure that makes it reliable, and putting it to work in crypto and equities.This is not a role where you maintain one component of a mature platform. The work crosses layers — one project might be a data pipeline for alpha generation or a distributed-systems bug, the next an evaluation framework or a product built alongside a trader — and you own what you build from design through deployment and operation. What you'll work onBuild the systems that ingest and process information for marketsBuild and operate the infrastructure behind research and executionBuild products and agents that help traders and researchers understand and act on markets, working directly with themDesign data pipelines for alpha generation and debug distributed systemsBuild evaluation frameworks and test research ideas with rigorTurn research and internal workflows into systems that run autonomously with agentsOwn substantial pieces of work end to end — understanding the problem, design, implementation, deployment, and operationHelp decide what gets built, how it gets built, and how the team knows it works What we look forExperience owning production software end to end — you've designed, implemented, tested, deployed, and debugged systems other people depend onStrong systems judgment — data models, interfaces, state, concurrency, failure modes, performanceDepth in at least one area: backend or distributed systems, data infrastructure, full-stack product engineering, research infrastructure, or applied AI and agent systemsEvidence that you can build — substantial software that other people actually use, and the ability to explain the decisions, the failures, and what you changedPrior experience building systems and products from 0 → 1Able to take a direction and drive it to completion without being managed through the workExceptional with AI and coding agents — top 1% of Claude Code/Codex users — while remaining fully accountable for the code you shipEnergized by hard problems, a lean team, and urgency — this is not a predictable 9–5 seatIn person in Palo Alto, 5 days/weekNo years-of-experience requirement — the bar is what you've shipped, not how long you've worked Nice to haveExperience with financial systems, real-time data, research tooling, or multi-agent systemsExperience building products in close contact with demanding usersGenuine curiosity about markets and how research, trading, and technology fit together — no finance background requiredA habit of fixing what's slow, manual, or broken without being asked Why join$180–250k base, generous equity, and hedge fund bonus upside at an early-stage companyOwn an important area of the company with substantial autonomy from day oneWork across systems, research, and product instead of being confined to one functionBuild systems that are deployed directly through a live, eight-figure fundJoin a small founding team with backgrounds spanning frontier AI, quantitative trading, and prediction marketsAgents are central to both the product and how the team operates — you'll build the systems that let one engineer do the work of severalH-1B sponsorship available