AI Engineer Lead

Capstone Investment Advisors•New York, NY

8h•$165,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Capstone Investment Advisors, LLC (“Capstone”) is a global asset manager, dedicated to exploring alpha opportunities in derivatives and complementary strategies that persist across market cycles. With approximately $11.8 billion of AUM (as of November 1, 2025) and 326 employees, Capstone is headquartered in New York with offices in London, Amsterdam, Stamford, Los Angeles, Boston, Tokyo, Milan, Texas, and Maryland. Since 2004, through strategic insight, market-leading expertise, and advanced technology, we have sought to anticipate and harness the complexities of world markets, creating unique opportunities for our clients, team, and industry. With our sophisticated, global client base, we recognize that our success is deeply connected to real people. For that reason, we take a human approach to everything we do, focusing largely on collaborative performance. Our workflow and process are built around the belief that by sharing ideas, we achieve greater outcomes. This gives you greater access to resources, direct exposure to senior leadership, and new opportunities to experiment and innovate. Learn more about how you can be part of the disciplined collaboration and transcendent thinking as our AI Lead at Capstone Investment Advisors here.

Requirements

Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field, with 5+ years of applied industry experience building and deploying production AI systems.
Hands-on experience building and operating production-grade LLM applications, including evaluation, monitoring, and iteration in live environments.
Experience with agentic and LLM frameworks, and a strong understanding of agentic design patterns.
Experience designing and operating MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers or equivalent agent integration layers, enabling secure, standardized communication between AI agents and enterprise data, APIs, and services.
Strong Python engineering expertise, including object-oriented design, microservices architectures, and REST API development.
Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to operate independently while collaborating effectively in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.

Nice To Haves

Intellectual curiosity, the openness to share ideas, humility, the highest ethical standards and a desire to excel are a few of the traits that it takes to thrive and be your best self at Capstone.
To thrive at Capstone, a keen curiosity about technology and artificial intelligence is essential, as we continually drive innovation and enhance our strategic capabilities.

Responsibilities

Define the technical vision and roadmap for AI initiatives firmwide, with a focus on applied AI and agentic systems.
Partner with key stakeholders (Portfolio Managers, quants, and business teams) to identify, prioritize, and execute high-impact AI opportunities.
Design, build, deploy, and own LLM-based products that solve specific business and investment workflows while generalizing into reusable, firm-wide AI capabilities.
Architect and implement agentic AI systems capable of multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool execution to augment research, trading, and operational decision-making.
Develop and operate MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and integrations to securely connect AI agents with enterprise data, APIs, and computational services.
Own the full LLM and agent lifecycle, including prompt and system design, model selection, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous iteration in production.
Lead applied AI R&D and rapid prototyping, leveraging techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, and modern agent/ML frameworks to move quickly from concept to production.
Establish best practices for model development, deployment, evaluation, and responsible use of AI in production environments.
Stay current with AI/ML advancements and selectively apply emerging techniques to solve complex business and investment problems.
Mentor and develop junior engineers and researchers, setting a high technical bar, sharing best practices in applied AI and agentic systems