Engineering Lead; AI​/ML Focus

Engineering Lead (AI/ML Focus)

Protogon Research builds AI models with a deep understanding of the world, monetizing them through proprietary trading. Founded and led by serial entrepreneur Rafael Cosman—co-founder of Archblock and the True Fi DeFi protocol—Protogon is charting a path toward superintelligence.

Focusing on trading provides several key advantages:

• Proprietary models and datasets – This helps us avoid the race-to-the-bottom faced by many other AI companies.
• Fast innovation cycle – Technological advancements directly translate into increased revenue, allowing us to rapidly test and implement improvements.
• Pure focus on AI development – With no need for sales, marketing, or customer support, we can concentrate on building groundbreaking systems.
• True understanding, not imitation – We create AI that deeply understands the world, rather than just replicating human behavior or generating superficial outputs.

We believe trading is a powerful testbed for developing highly intelligent AI systems, offering unique advantages over other approaches. Backed by top VCs, our highly technical team is on a mission to build the most transformative invention of the 21st century.

Unlike traditional quant funds, our goal isn't to focus on short-term profits but to build the long-term success of our AI technology. While we leverage AI for trading, everything—from our investors to our culture—is aligned with this vision of lasting impact. Moreover, we're not just another AI company layering a thin wrapper over existing technologies or burning through resources on models that add little value.

Our work is original, proprietary, and defensible.

We are a small, dynamic team of eight based in San Diego, CA, and we are seeking a talented Engineering Lead with a strong emphasis in AI and Machine Learning Engineering to help us build impactful technology and drive innovation. This role is central to our AI strategy: you will lead our MLE team, set the technical direction for our models and infrastructure, and own the end-to-end development of production AI systems.

We work primarily in person and are looking for candidates based in or willing to relocate to the San Diego area.

This role is expected to be primarily hands-on, with the majority of time spent building, training, and deploying models, while providing leadership to the entire engineering team.

• Applied AI Execution & Modeling Leadership Own the design, development, and deployment of production ML models used in live trading environments. Work closely with leadership and engineering partners to improve predictive performance, robustness, and adaptability across changing market conditions, with a strong focus on practical implementation and measurable real-world impact.
• Technical Leadership & Collaboration Lead the entire engineering organization, overseeing both ML engineers and broader software engineers. Set technical direction across the team, combine hands-on AI/ML execution with engineering management, and own hiring, onboarding, and development of engineers in partnership with company leadership.
• AI Systems, Data Pipelines & Model Quality Contribute to and improve core ML infrastructure, including data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation tooling, and inference systems. Ensure models are reliable, observable, and performant in both training and production environments.
• Execution Against Trading Objectives Work directly with leadership to identify high-impact modeling opportunities and translate them into executable ML work. Operate in an early-stage environment where objectives may be loosely defined, validating approaches through rapid experimentation and integrating models into evolving systems.

You bring 5–8 years of applied AI/ML experience, with 3+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing full engineering teams (not just AI/ML). You have a strong track record of shipping ML systems to production in environments where model performance directly impacts outcomes.

• Execution-Focused Problem Solver You excel at turning ambiguous problems into executable modeling work. You prioritize reliability, performance, and iteration over…