AI Engineer/ FDE (Python Backend)

AI / Forward Deployed Engineer

Must have 4+ years of professional experience after graduation.

We are an executive search firm focused primarily on technology hiring across the buy side, working with some of the most prominent hedge funds and investment firms in the market. We’ve had significant success placing high-caliber technology talent with our clients and are continuing to build out our pipeline as new searches come online.

AI has quickly become one of our most active areas of sear ch.

We are currently working on several AI / Forward Deployed Engineering searches with leading investment firms and have already started interviewing top candidates for these opportunities.

We’re looking for highly qualified engineers with strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on AI experience who can work directly with investment, research, and business teams to build practical solutions.

We are looking for engineers who can work directly with investment, research, and business teams to identify opportunities to use AI and then build the solutions themselves.

This is not a pure research or ML role. The focus is on building practical AI applications and putting them into the hands of users.

What you’ll be doing

• Work directly with investment, research, and other business teams to understand their workflows and identify where AI can add value.
• Build and deploy AI-powered applications, internal tools, and workflows.
• Work with LLMs, APIs, proprietary data, and third-party data sources.
• Build solutions around research automation, information retrieval, document analysis, data extraction, and other internal workflows.
• Take projects from an initial idea through prototype and into production.
• Work closely with users, gather feedback, and continuously improve what you build.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams around deployment, security, scalability, and reliability.

What we’re looking for

• Strong software engineering background, ideally with Python as a primary language.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs / Generative AI.
• Experience working with APIs, databases, data, and cloud environments.
• Understanding of areas such as RAG, agents, embeddings, prompt engineering, or LLM evaluation.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work with limited direction.
• Comfortable working directly with senior users and translating business problems into technical solutions.
• Strong academic background in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.

Buy-Side Experience is a huge plus

Financial markets experience is a plus, particularly exposure to:

• Hedge funds or asset managers
• Investment research or trading
• Portfolio management
• Financial data and research platforms
• Bloomberg, FactSet, Capital IQ, LSEG, or similar

That said, strong AI / software engineers from technology companies and startups are also very relevant. We are particularly interested in people who have built real AI products and enjoy working directly with users.

Why this is interesting

AI adoption across the buy side is moving quickly, and we are seeing significant demand for engineers who can bridge the gap between AI capabilities and real investment workflows.

We are working with multiple prominent funds on these searches, so there are opportunities to work on different types of AI problems across the investment management space.