The Opportunity
As an Algorithmic Trading Engineer at Nascent, you’ll build and own mission-critical systems that power our next-generation trading infrastructure. Working closely with traders, you’ll design and deploy high-performance, AI-driven pipelines that ingest real-time data, interpret complex signals, and execute strategies with tight latency constraints. From integrating LLMs into decision systems to optimizing streaming architectures, your work will sit at the core of our research and execution platform.
You might be perfect for this role if you are a deeply technical and high-ownership individual who thrives in low-structure environments and wants to build sophisticated systems from the ground up. You are a strong engineer with a creative edge, someone who’s comfortable at the intersection of infrastructure, machine learning, and execution, and who enjoys moving fast with clarity and purpose. This is an in-person role for our office in the Cayman Islands.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect and own critical infrastructure at the intersection of real-time trading and AI. Build low-latency components that integrate LLMs and embeddings directly into decision-making loops under strict performance constraints.
- Build scalable systems to ingest, process, and analyze high-volume market and research data. Use streaming technologies to enable real-time aggregation, enrichment, and feature computation across structured and unstructured inputs.
- Deploy transformer-based models into live pipelines for tasks like classification, relevance modeling, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Drive the design and optimization of prompts, embeddings, evaluation methods, and latency/performance trade-offs.
- Work directly with traders to build systems that interpret dynamic environments, identify trading signals, and optimize execution strategies. Lead rapid iteration cycles to convert exploratory ideas into production-ready tools.
- Take complete ownership of what you build—from high-level system design through infrastructure, deployment, and continuous optimization. Monitor and refine performance in production, with a focus on robustness, observability, and speed.
- Stay on the cutting edge of ML and infrastructure trends. Evaluate new transformer architectures, fine-tuning techniques, embedding models, and AI orchestration frameworks. Identify and integrate advancements that unlock new edge cases or improve performance.
About You
- You thrive in less structured environments, turning chaos into order, and are at your best when driving and delivering results with the freedom to build and execute your own plan
- You blend technical depth with execution velocity, and you’re not afraid to test, tune, and ship fast.
- You operate with first-principles thinking and thrive in cross-functional settings that bridge infra, ML, and trading.
- You want your work to directly power decision-making and performance in live, real-world systems.
- You’re curious and self-directed, always at the forefront of AI developments and testing new tools and techniques.
Preferred Experience
- 3+ years in software engineering, ideally working on performance-critical or ML-integrated systems.
- Hands-on experience with LLM frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Haystack) and transformer models (e.g., BERT, sentence transformers), including prompt design, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
- Strong knowledge of AWS (e.g., Lambda, ECS, CloudWatch), with experience in real-time data processing (Kafka, Redis, Kinesis) and time-series analytics.
- Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and relevance pipelines for retrieval-augmented generation and classification use cases.
About Nascent…
Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We’ve made venture investments in 100+ early-stage teams that we believe have the potential to create substantive change, expand boundaries, and find new horizons. We are consistently on the hunt for the most competitive and curious minds exploring the edges of the crypto ecosystem and leverage our hyper flexible structure to accelerate ideas into fully deployed strategies.
Our Team & Culture
At Nascent, we are an interdisciplinary team of investors, builders & creators, capable of achieving more together than we can as individuals. We offer the opportunity to contribute to building the future global economic system with a world-class team and culture that pairs the freedom to explore, experiment & play with a competitive drive to win. We invest in our people by providing the autonomy to build, coupled with accountability & honest feedback to help learn, grow, perform & win. We’re a fully distributed team that understands the value of in-person time—we host two team retreats per year and encourage team members to come together for more frequent in-person work.
Principles that drive our team & work
- Compete to win
- Own your shit
- Explore, experiment, play
- Always be building
- Seek and speak truth
What We Offer
At Nascent, we offer a competitive total compensation package heavily weighted toward bonus, ensuring that when we perform at our best and the firm wins we all win.
- The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
- Remote and distributed working environment
- Comprehensive health benefits package including dental, vision, and life
- Generous paid parental leave & supported return to work
- Home Office, coworking space and wellness stipend
- Retirement plan matching contributions
- Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
- Access to our internal performance coaching, technical experts and support for continuing your skill development and growth
- Team activities and in-person team retreats
We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity and differences of perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status, inclusive of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
