Artificial Intelligence Engineer

AI Engineer @ Astera Holdings

Location: Remote (Preference for New York)

Reports to: President and Chief Product Officer

About Astera Holdings:

Astera Holdings is a quantitative finance firm on a mission to build the "Renaissance Technologies of prediction markets." We are transforming this emerging category—where traders bet on real-world event outcomes—from a speculative frontier into a rigorous, scientific asset class. We are looking for a rare breed of builder to co-author this new chapter in quantitative finance.

Our company operates on a synergistic, three-pillar structure:

• Astera Capital: Our institutional asset management arm, designed to generate absolute, uncorrelated returns by systematically exploiting market inefficiencies.
• BetSmart: Our consumer-facing DaaS application, which makes smart betting accessible.
• Astera Analytics: Our premier B2B consulting partner, which deploys our core intelligence to solve complex enterprise challenges.

Our culture is a "Meritocracy of Minds," defined by Radical Intellectual Honesty, a Scientific Approach to Everything, and Lean Intensity.

The Opportunity

This is a unique opportunity for a talented and product-focused AI Engineer to build the intelligent systems that will define a new category of financial technology. You will be a foundational member of our central AI team, focused on designing and deploying the sophisticated, stateful AI agents that form the intelligent fabric of the Astera ecosystem.

Your initial and primary mission will be the ground-up creation of our flagship conversational AI agent—the primary interface through which our customers will access our proprietary intelligence. If you are passionate about building complex, agentic AI applications and want to see your work have a direct impact on both a consumer product and a quantitative trading platform, this role offers an unparalleled challenge.

What You'll Build: The Agentic Core

As an AI Engineer, you will be responsible for building the sophisticated AI agents and backend systems that power our products. You will have full ownership of the end-to-end development lifecycle for these critical components.

• Agent Architecture & Development: You will architect and build our flagship conversational AI agent from the ground up. This involves designing and implementing sophisticated multi-agent systems where specialized LLMs collaborate to provide clear, reasoned explanations for complex quantitative insights. You will use modern agentic frameworks to manage the agent's complex, stateful, and cyclical workflows.
• Intelligent Systems Development: You will build and maintain the secure, scalable backend APIs that serve proprietary quantitative insights to our consumer-facing products. This includes the systems that deliver curated, data-driven opportunities, as well as the APIs for our portfolio construction and capital allocation models.
• Full-Stack AI Integration: You will collaborate closely with our product, UI/UX, and front-end teams to seamlessly integrate AI features into our consumer application, ensuring the complexity of the underlying models is abstracted into a simple and intuitive user experience.
• Platform Contribution & Generalization: As our core conversational agent matures, you will identify and abstract its key components (e.g., orchestration logic, state management) into reusable services for the firm's broader intelligence platform, increasing development velocity across the entire company.

Who You Are: The Agent Builder

• An Engineer from a Premier AI Environment: You have hands-on experience building sophisticated AI systems or products at a world-class AI-native company (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind) or a top-tier quantitative firm. You are excited to apply your expertise in a new, data-rich domain.
• A Proven Builder of Agentic Systems: You have proven, hands-on experience building and deploying complex, multi-turn, stateful AI agents using modern agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain). A portfolio demonstrating your ability to build non-trivial agentic applications is required.
• An Expert in Modern AI Architectures: You possess a deep, practical understanding of modern agentic architectures, including multi-agent collaboration patterns (e.g., supervisor, network), state management in graphs, and the use of tools and APIs within agentic loops.
• A Strong, Production-Focused Software Engineer: You have strong, production-level software engineering skills in Python, including extensive experience with modern web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI, Flask), designing and building REST APIs, and working with databases (specifically NoSQL databases like MongoDB).
• A Product-Centric Collaborator: You have a product-centric mindset with demonstrable experience working in agile teams to ship user-facing features. The ability to translate user needs and product requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions is paramount.