Member of Technical Staff (Backend) at ATG (New York, NY)

ATG· New York, NY·6d ago

Role details

Work type

Hybrid

Employment

Full-Time

Job description

ABOUT US

ATG (Autonomous Technologies Group) is an AI lab deploying frontier reasoning systems within financial markets. Autonomous becomeautonomous.com is an agentic wealth manager built on this foundation.

Founders: Early GPU cloud (9 figure exit).

Investors: Led by Garry Tan / YC with participation from one of the most successful quant funds, BoxGroup (Plaid, Ramp, Stripe), and other top-tier angels.

About the Role

You’ll architect, build, and maintain the distributed systems, APIs, and backend infrastructure that power world-class AI research and deployment. Your work will enable rapid experimentation, robust data flows, and scalable compute. This is a hands-on role for someone who thrives in small, high-agency teams.

Responsibilities

Design and implement scalable backend services, data pipelines, and APIs
Build infrastructure for high-throughput, low-latency AI/ML workflows
Set up and manage databases (SQL/NoSQL), including schema design, replication, indexing, and performance optimization
Optimize for performance, reliability, and security at every layer
Implement observability best practices (logging, tracing, monitoring, performance tuning)
Work closely with research and infra teams to support experimental velocity
Contribute to core engineering culture, including code reviews and mentorship

Requirements

3+ years building distributed systems or high-availability backends (preferably in fast-moving or high-stakes environments)
Strong proficiency in Python and at least one systems language (e.g., Go, Rust, C++)
Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, and orchestration (AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes)
Database setup, management, and optimization experience (SQL/NoSQL)
Relentless focus on code quality, correctness, and performance
Comfortable leveraging modern AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to increase productivity & code output while maintaining high code quality, maintainability, and structure

Bonus – Agentic workflows / applied AI integration

Experience supporting or integrating agentic AI workflows into backend systems (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, Haystack, or custom frameworks)
Familiarity with persistence/checkpointing, streaming pipelines, and vector/knowledge store integrations

Why Join ATG

We're building a small, elite team. If you're excited by AI, markets, and building from first principles, we’d love to meet you.

Work on AI with a massive market opportunity
Early team of repeat founders backed by top investors
High agency, talent dense, zero bureaucracy

Why work at ATG

Impact: Work on AI with real stakes in a massive market (personal finance/wealth management). Early team members have direct influence on product direction.
Culture: High agency, zero bureaucracy, talent-dense environment. Described as "fast, ambitious, and flat."
Team: Work alongside repeat founders with a 9-figure exit and ex-researchers from top companies.
Work Model: New York City – Hybrid (onsite preferred for collaboration).
Compensation: Competitive; e.g., Full-Stack Engineer roles listed at $170k–$250k/year, Product Designer roles at ~$141k–$191k/year.
Engineering Culture: Emphasis on shipping quickly without cutting corners, building as thinking, and using cutting-edge AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to prototype and build.
Perks: Not explicitly listed, but the environment emphasizes autonomy, learning, and building from first principles.

About ATG

Company Overview

One-liner: ATG (Autonomous Technologies Group) is an applied AI research lab deploying frontier reasoning systems within financial markets to build a super-intelligent financial companion.
Entity Type: Private (early-stage startup)
Headquarters: New York City, NY, USA
Founded: Not publicly available
Founders: Repeat founders with a previous 9-figure exit in GPU cloud infrastructure (names not publicly disclosed)

Core Business

Primary industry/industries: Artificial Intelligence, Financial Technology (Fintech), Wealth Management
Target customers: B2C (individuals seeking personalized financial guidance and portfolio management)
Mission or purpose statement: To build a financial superintelligence that deeply understands the market, deeply understands each individual's financial life, and advances its representational capabilities to communicate complex insights with clarity and trust.

Products & Services

Autonomous (The Product): An application that onboards users into a system that learns their complete financial life and guides them with precision. It synthesizes quantitative and qualitative signals to surface causal forces driving market behavior. The system is designed to eventually act autonomously on the user's behalf, handling everything from tax alpha optimization to market timing decisions, with a focus on transparency and trust. It is a dynamic, generative UI system that adapts across voice, charts, and written analysis.

Market Standing

Valuation/Market Cap: Not disclosed (private company)
Key Metric: Total Funding not publicly disclosed; backed by top-tier investors
Notable Investors/Partners:
- Garry Tan (President of Y Combinator)
- Founder of one of the most successful quantitative hedge funds (undisclosed)
- BoxGroup (investors in Plaid, Ramp, Stripe)
- Top-tier angel investors
Growth Signals: Building a small, elite team; hiring for high-agency roles across research, engineering, and design; founders have a proven track record (9-figure exit); operating at the frontier of AI reasoning in financial markets.

Competitive Advantages

Frontier AI Research: An applied research lab, not just a fintech app, with a focus on original research in reasoning systems, LLMs, RL, and agent-based AI.
Deep Personalization: The system is designed to understand a user's complete financial picture—preferences, goals, constraints—not just portfolio allocation.
Tax Alpha Focus: Delivers sophisticated, repeatable tax optimization strategies at scale, a historically expensive and complex capability.
Founder-Market Fit: Repeat founders with deep AI/GPU infrastructure experience and connections to top-tier quant finance.
High Agency Culture: Flat, zero-bureaucracy environment where every team member has direct impact on product decisions.

Strategic Focus

Research-Driven Product: Investing heavily in fundamental AI research (new models, algorithms, architectures) and deploying those advances directly into the consumer product.
Agentic Future: Building toward a fully autonomous financial agent that acts on behalf of users continuously, regardless of whether they open the app.
Representation as a Moat: Developing sophisticated, adaptive communication systems (voice, charts, written analysis) that are calibrated to each user's level of understanding.
Small, Elite Team: Prioritizing talent density over headcount growth, with a focus on hiring researchers, full-stack engineers, and product designers who can operate across the entire stack.

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