Staff Backend Engineer (AI/Financial Data)

TL;DR

Staff Backend Engineer (AI/Financial Data): Building scalable backend infrastructure and data platforms that ingest, transform, integrate, and serve structured and unstructured financial data for enterprise AI products with an accent on distributed systems, data quality, and low-latency processing. Focus on designing streaming and batch pipelines, integrating heterogeneous financial sources, and enabling reliable AI retrieval and model performance at scale.

Location: On-site in New York City, United States

Salary: $250,000–$315,000 base salary, plus equity and benefits.

Company

AI product company transforming financial research and workflows for investment banks, private equity funds, and investment firms.

What you will do

• Own the design and production delivery of critical infrastructure for ingesting, transforming, and serving financial datasets.
• Architect high-throughput, low-latency streaming and batch data processing pipelines handling millions of documents and data points daily.
• Integrate market data vendors, proprietary sources, and third-party providers into reliable, queryable platforms.
• Partner with the Core AI team to structure and serve high-quality data for models and retrieval systems.
• Build secure and compliant integrations for sensitive enterprise customer data.
• Lead by example through technical ownership, high-quality engineering practices, and cross-team influence.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex, data-intensive backend systems.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with GCP or an equivalent cloud stack.
• Deep Python expertise and proficiency in Rust, C++, or Java, plus experience with distributed systems, asynchronous processing, streaming, queuing, caching, and observability.
• Strong SQL and relational database skills, with experience in NoSQL, Redis, and columnar data stores such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift.
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines, globally distributed engineering teams, financial data, and corporate finance or capital markets.

Nice to have

• Strong Java proficiency.
• Experience influencing engineering direction across teams without direct authority.
• Experience shipping products autonomously in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup environment with high ownership, autonomy, and a focus on solving ambitious technical problems.
• Collaborative culture emphasizing learning, craftsmanship, curiosity, and thoughtful communication.
• Work alongside specialists in AI and finance on products used by leading financial institutions.
• Full-time employees receive equity, comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, and paid time off.