Product Engineer, Applied AI
Paradigm · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
The Firm
Paradigm is a San Francisco-based investment firm focused on frontier technologies across the globe, with over $11 billion in assets under management. We make investments in companies and protocols at all stages, ranging from early-stage venture financing rounds to growth equity to liquid assets.
Paradigm was co-founded in 2018 and is co-led by Matt Huang and Alana Palmedo. We’ve been hard at work investigating the world’s most beautiful technical problems since day one. Our research-driven approach helps us build relationships with founders and entrepreneurs, but it also reflects our broader goal of accelerating the progress of frontier technology.
The Role
Over the last eight years Paradigm has built some of the most used open-source software in the crypto industry, including Reth and Foundry. Earlier this year we published EVMBench with OpenAI, launched Optimization Arena and hosted the Auto Research hackathon.
More recently, we open-sourced Centaur, a self-hosted runtime for multiplayer AI agents, which we’ve been using to transform how we work at Paradigm and Tempo.
All of these were done part-time by people on Paradigm’s Investing & Research team. This has made us realize that we are people-bound, not idea or impact bound. We need to grow our team to achieve our ambitions.
We want to do three things:
Experiment aggressively. We will push the capabilities of models, harnesses and infrastructure to the limit in service of Paradigm’s broader goals in investing, research, and building.
Build in public. We will get our hands dirty building useful open-source products.
Invest. We will leverage our infrastructure - an area we think is still ripe for disruption with AI - to be better investors. By understanding infrastructure gaps experientially, we may incubate companies that will accrue value by addressing these gaps.
As we deploy more long-running agentic capabilities, we may get into fundamental research, forecasting, model cost optimizations etc., but that is not our focus yet.
We are looking for fearless engineers for this project who understand infrastructure, security, AI models, harnesses, and Slackbots. You will work directly with Georgios, Arjun, Matt Slipper, and the broader Paradigm team, alongside Tempo, and other companies that are themselves operating at the frontier.
Your work will directly impact how Paradigm operates every day. If this sounds like you, reach out.
Responsibilities
Build for the people moving the firm: Embed with I&R, Events, and BizOps to find the work and decisions worth automating and ship agents to take it on. The features you build become how the firm sources, researches, and operates, which means your product sense directly shapes how effective Paradigm is.
Agent surfaces: Build the user-facing experience, primarily the Slack interface, so collaborating with agents feels fast, legible, and trustworthy.
Extensibility and developer experience: Own the systems teams use to extend Centaur without forking it including tools, workflows, skills, and overlays, and make building on top of it feel effortless.
Harness integration: Expand support across the different agent CLIs Centaur can run, keeping one clean execution model underneath.
Open-source stewardship: As an MIT-licensed project, you're the face of it to the community, triaging issues and PRs, writing the docs and examples, and shaping the guides that pull people in.
Qualifications and Experience
A track record of building world-class products
Experience applying modern AI and software systems to solve complex, ambiguous problems end-to-end
Comfortable navigating everything from foundational models to full-stack product delivery
Pragmatic, product-minded builder who cares about solving real problems rather than overfitting to academic ML goals
Ability to work autonomously and as a collaborator on the team
Attributes
Exceptional team player
Extreme open-mindedness
Clarity of thought
Clear and concise communication (both written and verbal)
Technical depth; analytical; rigorous
Highly curious; fast learner
Ability to bridge technical and investing mindsets
Interest in frontier technologies and crypto markets