Applied AI Engineer

We all know that software engineering is getting turned on its head.

It’s easy to pop open Claude Code and ask for help with small or repetitive tasks. But as the potential of these tools expand, questions emerge:

• How do we build the infrastructure and workflows to make the most of new advancements?
• How do we share context across the team to make these tools even more capable?
• And, most importantly, how do we keep code quality to the standard needed to support institutional finance, while staying close to the cutting edge?

This is where you come in.

We’re looking for an exceptional Applied AI Engineer to join our engineering team. You’ll be responsible for solving the problem: What does it look like for a team building mission critical software to use AI to its maximum potential?

You’ll work side-by-side with our engineers in Austin, building the tools and processes to keep us at the cutting edge, and using those tools to contribute to real production code.

Why Etherealize?

Etherealize is building the rails to bring Wall Street into the 21st century.

With $40M in funding from Electric Capital and Paradigm, we are bringing together the best minds from Ethereum and Wall Street to rebuild the infrastructure that underpins the financial system—faster, safer, fully on-chain.

This is a rare opportunity to join early and help shape not just what we build, but how we build it.

What Will You Do?

Your mission is to level up the entire organization’s impact and output by embedding AI deeply into how we engineer, operate, and make decisions.

You will:

• Accelerate engineering velocity with AI: The frontier of AI development is moving fast, but the frontier of applying these advances to mission critical systems lags far behind. Your job is to solve for what this looks like today, and continually reassess the right balance as the tools improve.
• Contribute meaningful production code: This is a real engineering role. You won’t know the bar we need to hit if you aren’t capable of delivering it yourself. You’ll contribute directly to our core product and use AI to amplify your own impact, ensuring the workflows you build actually work in production.
• Help shape AI functionality in our flagship product: Partner closely with product and engineering to ideate, prototype, and structure AI-powered product features.
• Systematize AI usage across the team: Help identify and implement high-leverage AI use cases across the company and evolve our team from “everyone uses AI” to “everyone is effectively managing a team of AIs,” with consistent quality, guardrails, and workflows.
• Stay ahead of what’s coming: Constantly experiment with new models, tools, and workflows, and exercise strong judgment about what’s worth adopting for our company. Be the go-to person others learn from when it comes to AI, and share learnings so adoption actually sticks across the team.

Who Are You?

You are a strong engineer first, and deeply obsessed with what AI makes possible. These past few months have likely been some of the most exciting of your career, filled with late nights experimenting with new ideas.

You are likely:

• A senior or mid-senior engineer who has already shipped and owned meaningful systems in production, with strong system-design instincts.
• Obsessed with how AI is evolving software engineering. You code every day, and your family may be starting to worry whether you like Claude more than them.
• Solutions-driven and personable — you take pride in being the go-to person who unblocks others, not just in what you personally build.
• Gleefully curious about optimization, efficiency, and what engineering teams will look like years into the future.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and grounding big ideas in production reality.
• Likely contributing open-source work, side projects, or public experimentation with AI productivity tools because you just can’t help yourself.

This role is likely not a fit if you are primarily interested in:

• Pure AI research or model training. This role is focused on applying existing models and tools to real engineering workflows, not developing or training new models from scratch.
• Short-term or advisory-only work. We’re looking for someone who wants to embed deeply with the team and own outcomes over time, rather than designing frameworks and handing them off.
• Automation disconnected from production engineering. The best ideas here are grounded in real code, real systems, and real constraints. You’ll be expected to contribute production-quality code alongside building AI-enabled workflows.
• Leading a team. This is an individual contributor role focused on building systems and workflows hands-on. While the AI team may grow over time, the expectation is that, for the foreseeable future, you’ll be leading a team of AI agents, not people.
• Working fully remotely. This role is designed to be highly embedded and collaborative. We spend 3 days per week together in the Austin office.

What’s In It For You?

• Career-defining scope. You’ll help define how teams building mission critical systems work with AI. We’ll likely release our systems, thinking, and open source code publicly, and you’ll be at the forefront of these breakthroughs.
• Nerd out all day. While many engineers have to save their AI rabbit-holing for nights and weekends, it’ll be the core of your day to day. Your job is literally to experiment, learn and develop the coolest things you can think of.
• Work with an exceptional team. Work closely with Zach Obront (CTO), Danny Ryan (President), and engineers from Goldman Sachs, Circle, Bloomberg, Kraken, NEBRA, and more.

Employment Details

• Location: Austin, TX (in-person required)
• Compensation: $200k - $250k base salary + equity. Final package based on prior experience and qualifications.
• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision healthcare, 401(k), generous PTO, and more. See overview here.
• Start Date: Q1 2026

Equal Opportunity

Etherealize values diversity in all its forms. We welcome qualified applicants of every background and identity.

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