Software Engineer, Applied AI

The Firm

Paradigm is a San Francisco-based investment firm focused on crypto and blockchain-related technologies across the globe. We make investments in companies and protocols at all stages including early-stage venture financing rounds, growth equity, and liquid token assets. Paradigm was co-founded in 2018 by Matt Huang (former Partner at Sequoia Capital) and Fred Ehrsam (co-founder of Coinbase). We are building a world-class team to support our portfolio and the crypto ecosystem globally.

The Role

Given the technical complexity of the projects we invest in, engineering is incredibly important to Paradigm. The Applied AI Engineering role will focus on integrating AI tooling into Paradigm’s internal operating system: software that supports the entire investment and portfolio management process. The system is the source of truth, building insights to the fund’s positions and relationships that inform how Paradigm invests and manages its portfolio.

You’ll be responsible for infusing AI throughout our internal operating system: deploying models that help automate workflows, augment human decision-making, and extract intelligence from messy, unstructured, or large-scale data. You’ll join the core internal engineering team, working to identify and deliver practical, durable applications of AI.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement AI-driven features and tools that enhance the intelligence and efficiency of our internal products

• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify high-leverage areas for ML/AI integration—e.g., data classification, entity resolution, retrieval augmentation, and intelligent automation

• Own the lifecycle of AI applications: from problem framing and dataset curation through model development, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring

• Extend and refine our internal data and compute infrastructure to support AI workloads (e.g., vector search, LLM APIs, RAG and LLM agents orchestration)

• Participate in regular engineering work, including performance improvements, reliability, and code reviews.

• Help shape technical strategy and architectural decisions related to AI/ML adoption within the firm.

Qualifications and Experience

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with experience applying AI/ML in production environments

• Demonstrated experience with ML/AI technologies such as: keyword/vector-based information retrieval, ETL, data processing pipelines, RAG systems, prompt engineering, foundation models (LLMs)

• Strong backend and full-stack fundamentals: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS/Node.

• 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

• Able to work in-person in San Francisco, CA 3 days a week.

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