---
title: 'Head of AI at Poesis'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-ai-poesis-zurich-n5g2ah6wmsg4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Head of AI at Poesis

- **Company:** Poesis
- **Location:** Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/poesis/15e888bf-5c67-43b2-9b87-e043eead393a

## Job description

## About Poesis

Whoever builds the leading intelligence for finance will create far more than returns. Poesis is the AI-native investment firm running autonomous agents that predict markets, construct portfolios, and manage risk. Our founders managed institutional capital at Capital Group ($3T AUM) and led enterprise ML at Goldman Sachs and Amazon. We're building a new type of firm, where live capital is the training ground for an intelligence that compounds with every signal.

## About the Role

Financial markets offer something rare in AI research: a continuous, objective feedback loop where you can test new ideas, measure whether they actually work, and use real-world outcomes to inform what you build next. It’s an opportunity to do frontier research with a direct line between the ideas you explore and their real-world performance. As Head of AI, you’ll lead Poesis’s AI strategy and research, setting the technical direction for how we apply frontier AI to investing. You’ll explore new AI approaches, tackle difficult research problems and help define how we use AI to better understand and predict financial markets. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll set the research agenda while continuing to work directly on technical challenges.

Challenges You’ll Work On

- Set Poesis’s AI research direction, identify the hardest problems worth solving and guide the team's technical work.
- Push the capabilities of foundation models, agentic systems and world models through new architectures and research approaches.
- Explore pre-training, mid-training and post-training methods to improve how models learn, reason and adapt.
- Advance tabular ML research, including emerging methods such as prior-data fitted networks (PFNs).
- Tackle the challenges of learning from small, high-dimensional datasets where traditional ML methods struggle.
- Turn promising research into models and systems that can solve difficult real-world problems.

## About You

- You’ve done exceptional AI research at a frontier AI lab, leading research initiatives and helping set technical direction.
- You have deep expertise in modern AI architectures, model training and machine learning.
- You have a strong research track record, including relevant publications.
- You have strong mathematical and statistical foundations and know how to tackle difficult problems with limited, complex data.
- You’re a hands-on technical leader who can guide other researchers while developing, testing and implementing your own ideas.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with frontier tabular ML methods.
- Experience applying ML to financial markets or complex, high-dimensional datasets.

Location Hybrid, 3 days per week on-site at our office in Menlo Park, CA, London, or Zurich. Relocation allowance available.

## Compensation

Competitive cash compensation commensurate with experience, plus equity and carry (share of fund profits).

## Benefits

We offer excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage, alongside a strong benefits package that includes catered lunches, commuter benefits, and more.

For U.S. candidates, current legal authorization to work in the US required; continuing work visa sponsorship available for full-time employees.

Working at Poesis As an early team member, you’ll help shape not just the product, but how the company operates. Your decisions will have lasting impact across the business. You’ll build from first principles, with no legacy systems, or entrenched processes slowing you down. Our team is made up of people from elite companies and universities who are low ego, collaborative, and excited to build together.

## About Poesis

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Poesis is an AI-native investment manager building a foundation model for investing, using modular AI systems to predict market movements and outperform legacy managers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Alex Popa (Founder & CEO), Charles Elkan (Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered asset management / hedge fund management
- **Target customers**: Institutional investors, asset managers, and clients seeking AI-driven alpha generation (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose**: “Build up a scale manager that never gets tired, predicts change earlier, and delivers consistent outcomes for clients in a world being reshaped by intelligence.”

## Products & Services
- **Large Investment Model (LIM)**: A single AI foundation model that powers every product—predicts markets, constructs portfolios, and manages risk. It is continuously trained on live capital markets data.
- **AI Agents**: Teams of modular, specialized agents that execute prediction, portfolio construction, and risk management tasks, democratizing access to alpha.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $3 million (estimated, 2025 – per GetLatka)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Recurring Revenue of $990K (estimated ARR for 2025 – per GetLatka); bootstrapped with no outside funding
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: None (bootstrapped)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 100% YoY (7 employees on LinkedIn, ~9 on other sources); active hiring for Head of Engineering, Machine Learning Engineer, and Quantitative Developer; LinkedIn follower growth +4.3% monthly

## Competitive Advantages
- First mover in building a **foundation model specifically for investing** (the Large Investment Model)
- Team composed of senior talent from **Capital Group, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon**—combining deep capital markets experience with AI expertise
- Modular, agent-based architecture that can rapidly adapt to market changes
- Real-world validation through live capital deployment (training on actual trading)

## Strategic Focus
- Scale the Large Investment Model to cover more asset classes and geographies
- Continue hiring top-tier AI and engineering talent (founding roles for ML engineers, quant developers, and engineering lead)
- Deliver consistent, systematic outperformance for clients through AI-native investment strategies

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast-moving startup environment with mentorship and high ownership; “build alongside investors and technologists reinventing the future of finance and AI”
- **Work model**: Hybrid (employees work both remotely and on-site; office in Palo Alto, CA)
- **Perks**: High-quality dental, vision, and health care; relocation support available
- **Visa sponsorship**: No H-1B sponsorship history found
- **Engineering focus**: Good learning environment for building production-scale AI systems; roles include founding-level impact

## Sources
1. [poesis.ai](https://poesis.ai/)
2. [LinkedIn – Poesis AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/poesisai)
3. [Built In – Poesis Inc.](https://builtin.com/company/poesis-inc)
4. [GetLatka – Poesis AI](https://getlatka.com/companies/poesis.ai)
5. [Scoutify – Poesis Careers](https://scoutify.com/companies/poesis/)

## Other roles at Poesis

- [Member of Technical Staff | Data Engineering, Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-data-engineering-finance-poesis-menlo-park-76y28rbhdhap) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff | Quantitative Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-quantitative-finance-poesis-menlo-park-1w1nvw9w85nb) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff | Machine Learning](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-machine-learning-poesis-menlo-park-q01hcr8xgkpw) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff | Agentic AI](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agentic-ai-poesis-menlo-park-456wbxpqnsa5) — Menlo Park, CA
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