Software Engineer - Applied AI

At Hudson River Trading (HRT), the Applied AI team’s mission is to increase the speed and quality of work across the firm’s most consequential workflows. We build AI systems that help researchers and developers iterate faster, automate increasingly complex work, and enable autonomous exploration at a scale that would not otherwise be possible.

We apply frontier models and agentic systems to quantitative research, software development, and other critical work at HRT. We combine cutting-edge commercial and open-source models and tools with our own infrastructure, research, and systems.

Our work spans the full stack required for success: AI infrastructure, research engineering, post-training and reinforcement learning, agent evaluation, security and alignment, and deployment into real workflows.

Responsibilities

• Building scalable infrastructure for training, evaluating, and operating language models and AI agents.
• Developing research environments, evaluation systems, and experimentation platforms to measure and improve agent performance.
• Improving model and agent capabilities through post-training, reinforcement learning, prompting, tool design, and workflow optimization.
• Designing sandboxing, policy enforcement, monitoring, and other safeguards for increasingly capable autonomous systems.
• Partnering with HRT teams to identify tasks AI can perform, develop effective solutions, and transition successful experiments into durable systems.
• Evaluating new models, techniques, and products, and making informed decisions about build, buy, or adapt strategies.
• Sharing technical knowledge and establishing effective practices for building and working with AI across HRT.

Profile

• You are an excellent engineer who can translate ambiguous problems into working systems.
• You learn unfamiliar technical and business domains quickly and enjoy shifting between them.
• You are committed to advancing what AI systems can reliably accomplish.
• You use rigorous measurement and experiment design to guide decisions.
• You are comfortable operating across both research and production engineering.
• You communicate clearly and collaborate well with individuals from diverse technical backgrounds.
• You are curious about the capabilities, limitations, and risks of increasingly autonomous systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong Python proficiency is required.
• Excellent software design, debugging, and problem-solving skills are required.
• Experience building and operating substantial software systems is required.
• Demonstrated engagement with modern AI systems, tools, or research is required.

Preferred Experience

• Machine learning research or engineering, including post-training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or alignment.
• AI-agent architecture, evaluation, or tool-use environments.
• Distributed systems, model serving, orchestration, or high-throughput research infrastructure.
• Security sandboxing, policy enforcement, adversarial testing, or governance for AI systems.
• Forward-deployed engineering: working closely with users to discover, build, and operationalize new capabilities.
• Proficiency in Linux, systems performance, networking, C++, or TypeScript.

Compensation and Culture

The estimated base salary range for this position is 200,000 to 300,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package.

Culture

Hudson River Trading (HRT) brings a scientific approach to trading financial products. We have built one of the world's most sophisticated computing environments for research and development. Our researchers are at the forefront of innovation in algorithmic trading.

At HRT, we welcome a variety of expertise: mathematics and computer science, physics and engineering, media and tech. We’re a community of self-starters motivated by the excitement of being at the cutting edge of automation in every part of our organization—from trading to business operations to recruiting and beyond. We value openness and transparency, celebrating great ideas from HRT veterans and new hires alike. At HRT, we’re friends and colleagues—whether we are sharing a meal, playing the latest board game, or writing elegant code. We embrace a culture of togetherness that extends far beyond the walls of our office.

Feel like you belong at HRT? Our goal is to find the best people and bring them together to do great work in a place where everyone is valued. HRT is proud of our diverse staff, with offices globally, benefitting from varied and unique perspectives. HRT is an equal opportunity employer; we would love to get to know you.

Please be advised: Use of AI tools during interviews or assessments is strictly prohibited, unless otherwise instructed or agreed upon. We employ various methods to evaluate the authenticity of candidate responses. If we determine that AI assistance was used during any stage of the hiring process, we reserve the right to immediately disqualify your candidacy or rescind any job offers extended.