XVI Labs is building a foundation model on high-stakes human decision data, starting with financial markets, to predict how people make decisions and to carry that to other high-stakes industries.
Location
Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square)
Type
Full-time, in person
Backed by
SoftBank and C-suite from HRT and RenTech
Funding
$12M seed. Very competitive comp.
Open roles
2
AI Engineer
Experience training large models and post-training models.
You'll train and post-train the models at the core of XVI Labs: models that learn from records of real decisions and predict what a specific person will do next, and why. We're early, so you'll help choose architectures, run the experiments that show what works, and take the winners to scale.
What you'll do
Pretrain and post-train models on large-scale market decision data, from data loading through evaluation
Fine-tune open-source models to predict an individual's next decision from the context they had before making it
Design and run controlled experiments: baselines, ablations, scaling runs and go/no-go tests written down before the run
Build evaluations that show whether a model has learned real decision behavior or only surface patterns
Own training infrastructure across multi-GPU runs, from hyperparameter sweeps to large training jobs
What we're looking for
Hands-on experience training large models and post-training models
Strong PyTorch and fluency with modern training stacks: distributed training, mixed precision, checkpointing
A deep understanding of sequence architectures, from transformers to state-space models
Rigor in experiment design: baselines first, and loss curves trusted only as far as the evals back them up
Comfort taking an open research question all the way to a working result
Strong candidates also have
Experience with time-series, financial or market microstructure data
Published ML research or substantial open-source work
Experience with reinforcement learning or preference-based post-training
A background in quantitative trading, decision science or behavioral economics
Experience as a founder or early engineer at a zero-to-one company
The role
You'll build the systems that turn raw records of human decisions into training data, and the systems that put our models in front of customers. You'll work across data, infrastructure and product, side by side with the research team.
What you'll do
Build ingestion pipelines for large decision datasets, starting with financial and prediction market data and expanding to new domains
Design storage and query layers for very large volumes of timestamped events
Build data quality tooling: deduplication, actor labeling, and leakage checks between training and evaluation data
Ship the interfaces customers use to query our models
Own reliability, testing and deployment across the stack
What we're looking for
Strong software engineering fundamentals and production experience in Python
Experience building data pipelines that stay correct at scale, with care for time ordering and edge cases
Comfort with cloud infrastructure, containers and CI
Experience in machine learning (preferred)
Ownership: you ship, measure, and fix what you shipped
Strong candidates also have
Experience with financial market data, blockchain data or other high-volume event streams
Familiarity with columnar tools such as Parquet, DuckDB, Polars or ClickHouse
Experience supporting ML training: data loaders, GPU infrastructure, experiment tracking
Experience as a founder or early engineer at a zero-to-one company
About XVI Labs
XVI Labs is building a foundation model for how people decide under uncertainty. Language models learn from text, which describes decisions after the fact. Markets record the decisions themselves: who acted, when, at what price, and what they could have known at that moment. We train on those records, starting with financial and prediction markets, to model how real people make high-stakes decisions, and we're testing how far that model carries into other high-stakes fields.
Why we're excited: Nearly every AI lab learns from what people say. Very few learn from what people actually do when something is at stake. Markets hold one of the largest, most precisely timestamped records of human decisions in existence, and we think it is the right place to start.
Who thrives here: People who want to own a hard problem end to end. We move quickly and stay rigorous: we decide in advance what result would prove an idea wrong, test it against data, and drop what doesn't hold up.
Logistics
This role is full-time and in person in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Compensation is very competitive and depends on experience. XVI Labs is an equal opportunity employer.
Apply for this role
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Thanks for applying. We read every application and will reach out by email.