Founding Software Engineer

About the role

Most 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 company

One-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 on

• Build the systems that ingest and process information for markets
• Build and operate the infrastructure behind research and execution
• Build products and agents that help traders and researchers understand and act on markets, working directly with them
• Design data pipelines for alpha generation and debug distributed systems
• Build evaluation frameworks and test research ideas with rigor
• Turn research and internal workflows into systems that run autonomously with agents
• Own substantial pieces of work end to end — understanding the problem, design, implementation, deployment, and operation
• Help decide what gets built, how it gets built, and how the team knows it works

What we look for

• Experience owning production software end to end — you've designed, implemented, tested, deployed, and debugged systems other people depend on
• Strong systems judgment — data models, interfaces, state, concurrency, failure modes, performance
• Depth in at least one area: backend or distributed systems, data infrastructure, full-stack product engineering, research infrastructure, or applied AI and agent systems
• Evidence that you can build — substantial software that other people actually use, and the ability to explain the decisions, the failures, and what you changed
• Prior experience building systems and products from 0 → 1
• Able to take a direction and drive it to completion without being managed through the work
• Exceptional with AI and coding agents — top 1% of Claude Code/Codex users — while remaining fully accountable for the code you ship
• Energized by hard problems, a lean team, and urgency — this is not a predictable 9–5 seat
• In person in Palo Alto, 5 days/week
• No years-of-experience requirement — the bar is what you've shipped, not how long you've worked

Nice to have

• Experience with financial systems, real-time data, research tooling, or multi-agent systems
• Experience building products in close contact with demanding users
• Genuine curiosity about markets and how research, trading, and technology fit together — no finance background required
• A 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 company
• Own an important area of the company with substantial autonomy from day one
• Work across systems, research, and product instead of being confined to one function
• Build systems that are deployed directly through a live, eight-figure fund
• Join a small founding team with backgrounds spanning frontier AI, quantitative trading, and prediction markets
• Agents are central to both the product and how the team operates — you'll build the systems that let one engineer do the work of several
• H-1B sponsorship available