Quant Developer in AI

About Encord

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production.

Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

Quant Developer in AI

You're a quant developer. You've built high-performance systems that process billions of events per day in real-time, and you care deeply about consistency, correctness and performance. Now you want to build in AI

This is your chance. Encord is a scale-up serving the frontier of physical AI and robotics, the largest technological revolution in history, where what you build ships fast and you own it. Help us build the AI data platform for the future of robotics.

The role

You know how to build systems that are fast and correct under pressure. The hardest problems in AI right now are data problems: distributed, data-intensive systems that have to stay correct and performant at scale.

You will join the Foundations team, who build the data systems that enable frontier robotics labs to generate, understand, train, and test on massive volumes of robotics data. We don’t just react to an order book tick - you will need to handle large 3D scenes, hour-long videos, LIDAR point clouds, and ML inference, all under tight performance and operational budgets.

Why now? A year ago we were a team of 100; now we're over 180 and still accelerating. You'll work directly with a high-bar team, take on high-stakes problems, and help shape where the platform goes next.

What you'll do

• Design, build, deploy and own data systems processing petabytes of data across billions of items, from design and architectural decisions all the way to deployment, monitoring and measuring impact

• Build robust distributed systems and reason carefully about how they fail and how they behave under load

• Design performant protocols and APIs, and tackle complex domains and immense scale with correct and pragmatic solutions, moving extremely fast while maintaining engineering quality.

• Build as part of a high-performing team, contribute your knowledge and experience to others.

Who you are

• You have personally developed and maintained systems from scratch, and know what trade-offs are involved in building reliable, performant software at speed. You will have excelled at something demanding, and can show that your good technical decisions day after day compounded into a competitive edge.

• You may not have AI or ML experience, and that's fine: you are an incredibly fast and curious learner. You can pick up a new topic and quickly become an expert by being ego-less in asking the right questions, and rigorous in performing experiments that propel you up the learning curve.

• You excel under pressure and uncertainty. You don’t let up the pace, you attack the heart of the problem, and you repeatedly make the right tradeoffs.

• You deeply care about the systems you build. You take pride in having thought through the failure modes, shipping readable, bulletproof code, and delivering today instead of next week.

• You enjoy being a member of a high-performing team. You contribute your best work and help others contribute their best. You'll always lend a helping hand when needed and level up those around you.

Experience requirements

• 1-5+ years building and operating serious institutional-scale systems.

• Fluency in Python or Typescript and a deep understanding of a least one of Rust, C++, Java or Golang.

• Solid core CS knowledge in data structures and algorithms, distributed systems concepts (databases, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching) and how they behave under load

• Experience owning services in production and improving quality through code reviews, testing, rollout and monitoring

• Experience at a trading firm, market maker, hedge fund or exchange is a plus: trading systems, market data pipelines, tick or time-series stores, risk engines, ML/QR research pipelines, are all relevant to what we build. Experience with large data migrations or re-architecture projects is a plus.

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week

• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe

• Daily company lunches

• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites