Head of AI / Principal AI Architect
Position Title
Position Title
Head of AI / Principal AI Architect / ML Engineer / Data Scientist
Location
Location
Hybrid - San Francisco (In-office 3 days / week)
Position Type
Position Type
Full-Time (Permanent or Contract)
Work Policy
Work Policy
Hybrid (No relocation assistance)
Start Timeline
Start Timeline
ASAP
Compensation
Base Salary : $200,000 - $350,000 (dependent on experience & level)
Equity : ~2% (flexible based on comp level and role)
Notes : Compensation varies based on interview performance and final role level
Overview
Reimagining the $1.25 trillion private wealth industry through AI, making elite alternative investments-like private equity and venture capital-accessible to a new generation of investors.
Founded : 2022
Stage : Seed (Raised ~$2M)
Revenue : Active customers with six-figure revenue and profitability
Backed by : Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, Phoenix Fund, Perpetua
Why Join
Join a YC-backed, high-growth fintech startup with a live product
Build foundational AI infrastructure for a category-defining wealth platform
Competitive salary + equity with meaningful ownership
High-agency culture with a deep tech and product focus
Work on cutting-edge agentic and multi-modal AI in production
Role Summary
Hiring a top-tier AI engineer to lead model development and architecture efforts for its AI wealth assistant. This is not a tooling or API integration role-this is for builders with deep experience in LLM development, agent frameworks, and multi-modal architectures.
You'll work directly with the CEO and CTO to create financial copilots, RAG-powered recommendation engines, and autonomous agents that analyze market conditions and help users build wealth.
Core Responsibilities
Architect and build generative AI systems for financial planning, analysis, and recommendation
Design and implement RAG pipelines for knowledge retrieval across financial documents
Lead development of autonomous agents for user-facing advisory workflows
Apply advanced prompting strategies (Tree of Thoughts, Constitutional AI, Agent protocol)
Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and business teams
Must-Have Qualifications
Hands-on experience developing LLMs or foundation models, not just API usage
Previous work at a top AI lab or foundation model company, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Google Brain, or Meta FAIR
PhD (or equivalent advanced degree) in AI / ML from a top institution (Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley, etc.)
Deep technical expertise in
Generative LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA 3)
RAG optimization & hybrid search
Multi-modal systems (text + voice)
Agent orchestration for financial analysis or planning
Strong collaboration and product mindset-able to work closely with non-technical teams
Comfortable with startup hours and pace (expectation : ~9am-9pm, 6 days / week)
Preferred Qualifications
Published in top-tier AI conferences : NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR
Fintech or financial modeling experience
Experience leading AI / ML research teams or projects
Experience building zero-to-one AI-powered products
Familiarity with Goodfin's tech stack : Python, TypeScript, Claude, LLaMA, DynamoDB, AWS
Do Not Apply if the following
Only used LLM APIs without hands-on model building
Career focus is outside of NLP / LLMs (e.g., vision, robotics, traditional ML)
Multiple short stints or lack of deep technical execution
Unavailable for intense startup culture and long hours
Interview Process
Hiring Manager Screen
CTO Interview - Technical deep dive
CEO Interview - Vision and mission alignment
System Design (45 min) - Conversational chatbot architecture + hallucination mitigation
Coding Round - Live or take-home (case-by-case)
Behavioral Interview - With business team
Offer
Application Pre-Screen Questions (Mandatory)
Have you worked at a top AI lab or foundation model company (e.g., OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic)?
Have you personally developed or fine-tuned large-scale language models?
Are you open to working 9am-9pm, six days a week, during core build phases?
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Principal Ai Architect • San Francisco, CA, US