Engineering Lead (ML Research Focus)

Protogon Research is a small, VC-backed team based in San Diego, CA, focused on designing autonomous AI systems for financial markets. They are seeking an Engineering Lead with a focus on ML Research to lead the engineering team, drive innovation, and oversee the development of production AI systems.

Responsibilities:

• Own the research, design, development, and deployment of production ML models used in live trading environments
• Formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and evaluate new modeling approaches
• 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
• 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
• Drive the adoption of AI tools and workflows that help the engineering team move faster across research, software development, planning, documentation, and collaboration, while maintaining high standards for technical rigor and execution
• 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
• 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