Founding Software Engineer

## About Vigil Labs Vigil Labs builds AI to solve markets, starting with agents that supercharge discretionary traders. To commercialize its technology, the company operates an eight-figure hedge fund. It is building at the frontier of markets and artificial intelligence, spanning research, systems, and product for crypto and equities. ## The role You will work directly with traders, researchers, and other engineers to build Vigil's technology: systems that ingest and process information, infrastructure for research and execution, and products and agents that help the team understand and act on markets. The work crosses layers and may include designing data pipelines for alpha generation, debugging distributed systems, building evaluation frameworks, testing research ideas, or developing products alongside traders. You will own substantial work from understanding the problem through design, implementation, deployment, and operation. You will help decide what to build, how to build it, and how to evaluate whether it works. You will also help turn research and internal workflows into systems that can run autonomously with agents. There is significant room to shape the role around your strengths, with substantial autonomy over an important area. ## Responsibilities - Build systems that ingest and process information for markets. - Build and operate infrastructure that supports 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; debug and operate distributed systems. - Build evaluation frameworks and test research ideas rigorously, including the hypothesis, baseline, evaluation, and what the evidence supports. - Own substantial work from problem understanding through design, implementation, deployment, and operation, including observability and recovery. - Turn research and internal workflows into systems that can run autonomously with agents. - Help decide what gets built, how it is built, and how the team knows it works; break foundational projects into milestones and manage the project cycle. - Respond to incidents with urgency, restore correct behavior, and fix underlying causes. - Improve how the organization works by replacing repeated requests, manual handoffs, and coordination bottlenecks with tooling and automation. ## Qualifications - Experience owning production software end to end, including designing, implementing, testing, deploying, and debugging systems others depend on. - Strong systems judgment, including the ability to reason about data models, interfaces, state, concurrency, failure modes, and performance. - Depth in at least one relevant area: backend or distributed systems, data infrastructure, full-stack product engineering, research infrastructure, or applied AI and agent systems. - Evidence of building and shipping substantial software that people use, and ability to explain decisions, constraints, failures, and what changed as a result. - Prior experience building systems and products from 0 to 1. - Ability to communicate reasoning, designs, tradeoffs, and unexpected results clearly. - Ability to take direction and priorities, work out what needs to happen, and drive it to completion with decisions and open issues clearly communicated. - Exceptional use of AI and coding agents, while remaining accountable for the code shipped. ## Desired qualifications - Experience with financial systems or real-time data. - Experience with research tooling or multi-agent systems. - Experience building products in close contact with demanding users. - Genuine curiosity about markets and willingness to learn how research, trading, and technology fit together; formal finance experience is not required. - Comfort working with incomplete information, identifying key uncertainties, investigating, and deciding when an experiment can answer a question. - Habit of improving what is wrong, slow, or unnecessarily manual, including foundational work. ## How we work Vigil moves quickly and expects people to take substantial responsibility for what they ship. The company values demonstrated correctness, rigorous research evaluation, production ownership, clear architecture, attention to detail, autonomy, communication, urgency, and integrity. Engineers are expected to use AI and agents effectively while understanding, explaining, modifying, and debugging the work they produce. ## How we hire - A short written application describing your work and interest. - A conversation with the team about your experience and technical background. - A substantive engineering take-home with a defined time box. - A paid, in-person work trial involving a problem the company is tackling and meaningful ownership. - References from people who have worked closely with you.Use AI and agents during engineering exercises. Candidates must be able to explain and modify their work and respond when something fails.