About Our Client
We are partnering with a multi-billion dollar, industry-leading buy-side investment firm to identify a transformative leader. This is a rare opportunity to architect and scale the AI function for an organization committed to redefining fundamental investment research through cutting-edge technology.
The Opportunity
They are seeking a Head of AI who is as passionate about solution architecture and engineering delivery as they are about the bleeding edge of AI research. This is not a back-office automation role. You will operate in the heart of the front office, building autonomous systems designed to augment and enhance the investment research engine.
Your mission is to apply AI to fundamental investment research. This involves working with nuanced, complex data—earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, news events, and financial statements—to generate revenue. Experience in systematic trading, market making, or back-office operations is specifically less relevant for this mandate.
The Mandate: Solution Architecture & Delivery
You will own the full AI lifecycle, bridging the gap between R&D and production. Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting Autonomous Systems: Design and build agentic workflows and autonomous AI agents that improve the depth and speed of investment research.
- Cutting-Edge R&D: Drive the application of advanced techniques including sophisticated agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) at scale, and complex tool-calling architectures (e.g., “Openclaw” equivalents) to navigate and synthesize financial data.
- Model Optimization: Lead the fine-tuning of open-source models (LLMs) for domain-specific financial inference and reasoning.
- Owning the Technical Stack: Take end-to-end ownership of the AI lifecycle, including:
- Compute: Optimizing GPU and cloud infrastructure for performance and cost.
- Systems: Engineering for low-latency, high-reliability inference.
- Data: Architecting pipelines for both structured and unstructured financial data.
Reporting Structure
The reporting line is flexible by design to ensure you have maximum support. You will maintain a dual reporting line into both the COO (representing the business mandate) and the Head of Technology (representing infrastructure and engineering). Depending on your background, one will be your solid line and the other dotted, ensuring you have both the business mandate and the technical backing to execute.
The Ideal Candidate
- Background: You have a proven track record of applying AI within an investment management context, specifically to enhance fundamental research.
- Technical Depth: You are an expert in the modern AI stack (Python, PyTorch, LangChain, LlamaIndex, vector databases) and have hands-on experience deploying and fine-tuning open-source models.
- Architectural Mindset: You are a Solution Architect at heart. You don’t just experiment; you design systems that are scalable, reliable, and deliverable. You are happy to lead a pod of AI/ML experts and act as the technical authority.
- Intellectually Curious: You live and breathe the AI landscape week by week. You are passionate about “R&D-ing” what’s best for specific use cases, from agentic reasoning to advanced RAG.
If you are a technologist who wants to build the future of fundamental investing, we want to hear from you.
To apply for this job email your details to bianca.lo@ashford-benjamin.com