FDE Senior Engineer, AI & Capital Markets

About KX

KX software powers the time-aware data-driven decisions that enable fast-moving companies to outpace competitors, realizing the full potential of their AI investments. The KX platform delivers transformational value by addressing data challenges related to completeness, timeliness, and efficiency, ensuring companies understand change over time and can achieve faster, more accurate insights at any scale, cost-effectively.

KX is essential to the operations of the world's top investment banks, aerospace and defence, high-tech manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, automotive and fleet telematics organizations. The company has established offices and a robust customer base across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Overview Of The Role

This is a senior, hands-on delivery role with the Forward Deployed Engineering team at KX: part solution engineer, part AI engineer. You work alongside quants, traders, e-trading desks, and research teams inside their own environment, designing and building systems that put language models, agents, and vector search on top of the deepest time-series data in the industry.

Working with the most innovative investment banks, hedge funds, market makers, and exchanges globally, you own delivery from first design through to production, on timescales measured in weeks rather than quarters. The role needs enough domain knowledge to be trusted by the desk and enough engineering depth to make the system work at institutional volume.

About Forward Deployed Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineering is how KX works with its leading customers on their hardest problems. Rather than handing a customer software, we put senior engineers inside their environment, alongside their quants, traders, risk teams, and platform engineers, to design, build, and prove the thing that solves the problem, and we stay until it runs in production.

The team is deliberately small, senior, high impact, and it is being built now, which means the standards, the architecture patterns, and the way we work are still open questions. If you would rather set them than inherit them, this is the moment to join.

Key Responsibilities

• Identify the viable use cases: work with quants, traders, and researchers to identify where AI genuinely changes the economics, and to rule out the cases where a well-written query would do. Feasibility, data readiness, cost to run, and an agreed definition of good enough before anything gets built.
• Map and prepare the data estate: work alongside the customer's quants and data owners to understand the estate and its ontology, then join unstructured sources (research, filings, news, broker commentary, chat) to structured market and trade data. Point-in-time correctness, corporate actions, symbology, and survivorship are what decide whether the answer is right.
• Build the retrieval and inference layer: embedding pipelines, chunking suited to financial documents, index selection and tuning, and hybrid search across vector similarity plus time, symbol, and entitlement filters. Then the serving path: latency budget, cost per query, caching, and behaviour under load.
• Build the agent and tooling layer: give models controlled access to the customer's data and analytics through tool and function definitions, context assembly, and multi-step orchestration, with guardrails including entitlements, so an agent can never see what the user cannot.
• Define the evaluation framework: build the evaluation harness alongside the customer's own experts: golden sets, accuracy and recall measures, regression tests, and latency and cost benchmarks. On a system that cannot be measured will not be approved for production.
• Design the data platform: schema, partitioning, on-disk layout, attribute and index selection, compression, and query paths, so the analytics the desk wants next year are straightforward rather than a rebuild.
• Lead through to production: deploy into a secure, regulated environment, with monitoring, alerting, index and model refresh, a runbook, and a documented handover. You remain engaged until the system is running in production.
• Build reusable assets: reusable accelerators, reference implementations, and clear requirements back to KX Engineering, so the next engagement starts further forward than the last.