Unusual Ventures
Senior SWE – ETL Processing and Infrastructure
Job Description
We’re looking for a motivated Software Engineer to join our growing team of 8
What We’re Building
At Portrait Analytics, we’re creating the most transformative product for financial research since the launch of the Bloomberg terminal in 1981. Portrait Analytics is building an AI-powered research analyst to help investors to generate and research world-class investment theses in record time.—Information overload is endemic to the financial industry. There are tens of thousands of public companies, and each company has thousands of pages of documents to consume. Today, 1+ million financial professionals globally spend countless hours digging through these documents in order to extract, summarize, and synthesize this unstructured data as part of their research process.—We’re building the Portrait Analyst to give these overworked professionals super-powers. Portrait leverages state-of-the-art AI models to massively accelerate the speed of research by answering challenging questions and producing impactful research for its users.Our long-term vision is for the Portrait to be the most capable financial professional in the world.__We have world-class asset managers as design partners and customers. When combined with our $10M in funding and highly experienced team, we are poised to reshape the financial research landscape. Should you join our team, you’ll play a pivotal role in driving this success.
The TeamDavid Plon: CoFounder & CEO. Previously: Principal @ Baupost ($30B Hedge Fund); Stanford GSB.Connell Gough: CoFounder & Head of Engineering. Previously: Technical Lead @ EquipmentShare, YC-Backed Unicorn.Eric Moster: Senior AI Analyst. Previously: Portfolio Manager @ Millennium, Sr Analyst @ CitadelYuval Merhav: Founding ML Engineer. Previously: ML Engineering Manager @ Twitter Cortex; Senior ML Scientist @ Amazon Alexa; PhD, Computer Science.Wayne Krug: Founding Backend Engineer. Previously: Senior ML Engineer @ Twitter; Senior Software Engineer @ Bloomberg LP.Nacho Garcia: Founding Frontend Engineer. Previously: CoFounder @ Hadron.App.Mark Weiss: ML / Backend Engineer. Previously: Software and ML Engineer @ Meta, Data Science & ML @ RampJanita Chalam: Backend Engineer. Previously: Founding Engineer @ plurigrid inc, SWE @ Microsoft & Uber
We are very well-funded (10M+) by great investors (Unusual Ventures, .406 Ventures), founders, and industry partners.
How you’ll add value
We’re early in our journey, and there is much to build. With revenue beginning to inflect as we achieve product-market fit, we are looking for an experienced backend engineer to play a crucial role in scaling our infrastructure to accelerate data ingestion and support orchestration of complex downstream workflows. Here is some of the work you’ll be doing:
– Working with the team to design the schema, principles and best practices to follow when adding data sources to our application.- Writing software and managing infrastructure that utilizes machine learning to integrate diverse document types and sources within our search system.- Working on features that utilize said data sources to solve specific workflows.
In the years to come, there are many ways in which you could drive impact at Portrait and take on increasingly senior roles. Your exact path will ultimately be up to you.
What We’re Building
At Portrait Analytics, we’re creating the most transformative product for financial research since the launch of the Bloomberg terminal in 1981. Portrait Analytics is building an AI-powered research analyst to help investors to generate and research world-class investment theses in record time.—Information overload is endemic to the financial industry. There are tens of thousands of public companies, and each company has thousands of pages of documents to consume. Today, 1+ million financial professionals globally spend countless hours digging through these documents in order to extract, summarize, and synthesize this unstructured data as part of their research process.—We’re building the Portrait Analyst to give these overworked professionals super-powers. Portrait leverages state-of-the-art AI models to massively accelerate the speed of research by answering challenging questions and producing impactful research for its users.Our long-term vision is for the Portrait to be the most capable financial professional in the world.__We have world-class asset managers as design partners and customers. When combined with our $10M in funding and highly experienced team, we are poised to reshape the financial research landscape. Should you join our team, you’ll play a pivotal role in driving this success.
The TeamDavid Plon: CoFounder & CEO. Previously: Principal @ Baupost ($30B Hedge Fund); Stanford GSB.Connell Gough: CoFounder & Head of Engineering. Previously: Technical Lead @ EquipmentShare, YC-Backed Unicorn.Eric Moster: Senior AI Analyst. Previously: Portfolio Manager @ Millennium, Sr Analyst @ CitadelYuval Merhav: Founding ML Engineer. Previously: ML Engineering Manager @ Twitter Cortex; Senior ML Scientist @ Amazon Alexa; PhD, Computer Science.Wayne Krug: Founding Backend Engineer. Previously: Senior ML Engineer @ Twitter; Senior Software Engineer @ Bloomberg LP.Nacho Garcia: Founding Frontend Engineer. Previously: CoFounder @ Hadron.App.Mark Weiss: ML / Backend Engineer. Previously: Software and ML Engineer @ Meta, Data Science & ML @ RampJanita Chalam: Backend Engineer. Previously: Founding Engineer @ plurigrid inc, SWE @ Microsoft & Uber
We are very well-funded (10M+) by great investors (Unusual Ventures, .406 Ventures), founders, and industry partners.
How you’ll add value
We’re early in our journey, and there is much to build. With revenue beginning to inflect as we achieve product-market fit, we are looking for an experienced backend engineer to play a crucial role in scaling our infrastructure to accelerate data ingestion and support orchestration of complex downstream workflows. Here is some of the work you’ll be doing:
– Working with the team to design the schema, principles and best practices to follow when adding data sources to our application.- Writing software and managing infrastructure that utilizes machine learning to integrate diverse document types and sources within our search system.- Working on features that utilize said data sources to solve specific workflows.
In the years to come, there are many ways in which you could drive impact at Portrait and take on increasingly senior roles. Your exact path will ultimately be up to you.
Must haves
- You are a motivated individual with a keen interest in advancing the capabilities of LLMs by tackling challenging, real-world problems.
- You thrive in fast-paced environments and enjoy wearing multiple hats, collaborating with small teams, and taking ownership of various parts of a tech stack.
- You have a strong risk tolerance and are excited by the challenges that startups bring
- You are comfortable working remotely and collaborating closely with a small team.
- You like working on complex systems and have an awareness of your works downstream effects all the way to the end user.
- You’re hesitant and intentional about adding complexity to a system.
- Experience working on ETL pipelines.
Nice to haves:
- An interest in ML for text segmentation and labeling for search systems.
- Experience with using OCR to understand images containing text and tables.
- Experience working with Search and Relevance systems.
- Experience working with ML models for creating embedding and or classification tasks.
- Experience working with AWS and CDK.
Our Interview Process
- Intro call (20 minutes) with Connell (Cofounder & Head of Engineering)
- 30 minute conversations with David (Cofounder & CEO)
- Take-home project (<4 hours) and presentation to the team
- 60 – 90 minute cultural deep-dive conversation
- Informal chat with investors and other team-members
- Reference checks
- Offer conversation
Our compensation philosophyAs compared to other well-funded, seed-stage startups, we aim to pay at market for cash compensation and well above market for equity compensation.
