Role: L5-L6 Senior Full Stack Engineer / RAG

Location: Onsite 5 days a week in Flatiron District, NYC

Salary: $150K–$200K + equity

Clutch Creative is a rapidly growing staffing agency. We support our clients by identifying unreachable talent that helps their businesses grow.

Our candidates work with us because they know we have the best opportunities available to them and will help them navigate their next career move.

We care, we're honest, and we hustle—that's what makes us Clutch.

Our client is building the research intelligence layer for quantitative finance — the platform where investment hypotheses are formed, tested, and refined through a tight loop of data, models, and AI. They are a small founding team with deep domain expertise, a working product, and the conviction that the future of investment research looks nothing like its past.

As one of the first engineering hires, you will help build the engineering team from the ground up. You will set the technical culture, make foundational architecture decisions, and own the craft of the product in a way that is rarely possible at any other stage. The work spans LLM orchestration, vector search, financial data pipelines, and a research UX that demands precision.

They are looking for an engineer at the L5 or L6 level: someone who has shipped production systems at scale, thinks carefully about tradeoffs, and brings real taste to both code and product. Prior experience in fintech or quantitative research is not required — intellectual curiosity and engineering rigor are paramount.

Early work will span backend performance, frontend product quality, SecOps, deployment, and infrastructure reliability. As the team grows, you will have the opportunity to define your area of deepest ownership.

WHAT THEY'RE LOOKING FOR

• Experience: Significant professional software engineering experience (typically 5+ years) with clear evidence of increasing scope and ownership.
• Full Stack Capability: Production-grade full stack ability to own features end-to-end (backend-heavy is acceptable, but comfortable working in the frontend as needed).
• Architecture & Systems Thinking: Strong capability to design clean, extensible architectures and make pragmatic tradeoffs under uncertainty.
• Security & Infrastructure: Deep awareness of security in real-world deployments (handling sensitive data in on-prem, air-gapped, or regulated environments), thinking in terms of threat models. Experience operating across cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments.
• Core Tech Stack: Strong Python backend fundamentals (API design, async patterns, data modeling, performance profiling) and comfort with modern frontend frameworks (React/TypeScript preferred).
• AI/RAG: Genuine comfort working with LLM APIs and retrieval-augmented systems as a primary engineering surface.
• Soft Skills: Strong communication, judgment, ability to navigate ambiguity, and decision-making skills in a high-trust team.

WHAT TO EXPECT

• Ownership & Equity: Early-stage cash compensation complemented by meaningful equity and ownership in the business.
• Direct Impact: Direct exposure to the full business, including strategy, product direction, and customer conversations.
• Dynamic Environment: A fast-paced setting where priorities shift with learning, offering a direct role in shaping product direction.
• Culture: High-standard, collaborative colleagues focused on driving major impact.

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