Staff AI Engineer, StockStory

Versant • Englewood Cliffs, NJ

9h • $140,000 - $165,000 • Onsite

About The Position

StockStory, now part of CNBC under VERSANT, is building the next generation of AI-powered equity research for individual investors. This is a chance to build products that can shape how millions of consumers understand markets and make investing decisions. We offer the best parts of a startup environment - small team, high ownership, fast execution, and room to experiment - with the backing and stability of VERSANT, an independent publicly traded media company. As an AI engineer, you will work on both an existing AI product with real user impact and greenfield projects with significant room for exploration. The work spans cutting-edge LLMs, large-scale data systems, financial reasoning, and research tooling, with opportunities to apply ideas from functional programming and graph-based systems where they create real advantage. You will be joining a team of exceptional engineers, analysts, and investors working at the intersection of AI and public markets. A particularly rare part of this role is the level of direct access to experienced market professionals, including former hedge fund managers and top-tier analysts, whose insights can directly inform how you think about modeling, signals, and product design. For an ambitious AI engineer, it is an unusual opportunity to work with cutting-edge LLMs and advanced data systems while learning firsthand how sophisticated investors analyze businesses and markets. We're looking for a Staff AI Engineer to help build the next generation of AI-powered equity research. This role is for engineers who are excited by taking LLM capabilities beyond prototypes and turning them into robust product systems that deliver real value in production. It is especially well suited to people who enjoy designing end-to-end workflows, shaping technical direction, and building reusable foundations that help multiple teams move faster. You will design, build, and ship LLM-powered systems that integrate into new and existing workflows across the platform, spanning orchestration, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, and operational safeguards. You will also help define the engineering standards and architectural patterns that make these systems reliable, scalable, and maintainable over time. This role sits within a small and growing, high-caliber team where individuals are expected to operate with a high degree of ownership and autonomy, contributing directly to core product, infrastructure, and AI platform decisions while working closely with engineering and senior leadership in a highly collaborative, low-bureaucracy environment with direct access to decision-makers. A genuine interest in investing, public markets, and fundamental business analysis is expected.

Requirements

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, with a strong track record of building and shipping production systems
• Proven experience designing and deploying LLM-based or GenAI systems in real-world applications
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with modern backend architecture and distributed systems
• Understanding of LLM workflows, including prompting, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation methodologies
• Experience building scalable data pipelines and working with large, messy, or unstructured datasets
• Ability to design systems with strong observability, reliability, and performance characteristics in mind
• Experience working in cross-functional environments and leading technical projects end-to-end
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated interest in financial markets, investing, or business analysis

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end distributed agentic AI solutions that are reliable and scalable
• Lead cross-functional initiatives requiring coordination across multiple teams and shared systems
• Mentor other engineers and define quality standards and best practices
• Own long-term maintainability, observability, and cost efficiency of AI systems
• Monitor model quality drift, prompt alignment, alerting, and operational health

Benefits

• Free onsite fitness center with state-of-the-art equipment, plus daily group classes
• Gourmet cafeteria with daily specials plus soup and salad bars
• Dry cleaning, shoe shining and sneak peeks
• Free shuttle transportation to and from multiple locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey City
• Health insurance
• Retirement plans
• Paid time off

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed