Applied AI Engineer

Plexus has partnered with a team who are on-boarding Wall St. to blockchain, via Ethereum. They are strongly backed by leading VC’s, and are putting together a star-studded team. They plan on doing so through engineered solutions, marketing campaigns and educational products.

Applied AI Engineer

Software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped.

It’s now trivial to open tools like Claude and offload small or repetitive tasks. But as these tools become more powerful, harder questions start to matter. How do teams build the right infrastructure and workflows to actually benefit from rapid AI advances? How is context shared so these tools compound across an organization rather than living in silos? And how do teams maintain the level of code quality required for mission-critical, institutional-grade systems while staying at the cutting edge?

This role exists to answer those questions.

We’re looking for an exceptional Applied AI Engineer to join a high-performance engineering team building mission-critical financial infrastructure. Your core challenge will be defining what it looks like for a modern engineering organization to use AI to its full potential — not in theory, but in production.

You’ll work closely with engineers on the ground, embedding directly into day-to-day development. You’ll design and evolve AI-powered workflows, build the tooling that supports them, and use those same systems to contribute meaningful production code yourself.

The Opportunity

This company is building next-generation financial infrastructure designed to operate at institutional scale. Backed by leading investors and combining deep experience from both traditional finance and crypto-native engineering, the team is rebuilding foundational systems to be faster, safer, and fully on-chain.

This is an early-stage opportunity with real influence — not just over what gets built, but how it gets built. You’ll have the mandate to shape engineering practices at a moment when AI is redefining the craft.

What You’ll Do

Your mission is to dramatically increase the organization’s leverage by embedding AI deeply into engineering, operations, and decision-making.

You’ll focus on accelerating engineering velocity through AI, closing the gap between cutting-edge tooling and real-world production systems. This means continuously evaluating new models, agents, and workflows, and deciding what is actually worth adopting today.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You’ll contribute directly to core production systems, using AI to amplify your own output and ensuring that the workflows you design stand up to real constraints. You’ll partner closely with product and engineering teams to prototype and ship AI-enabled product features, and you’ll help systematize AI usage across the company so quality, guardrails, and consistency improve as adoption scales.

Over time, you’ll become the internal reference point for applied AI — experimenting relentlessly, exercising strong judgment, and sharing learnings in a way that actually sticks across the team.

Who You Are

You’re a strong engineer first, with a deep obsession for what AI is unlocking. The past few months have probably been some of the most exciting of your career, filled with constant experimentation and late-night tinkering.

You’ve already owned and shipped meaningful systems in production and have solid system-design instincts. You think constantly about how AI is changing software engineering, you code every day, and you’re known as someone who unblocks others, not just someone who ships in isolation. You’re curious to the point of delight about optimization, efficiency, and what engineering teams will look like in five or ten years.

You’re comfortable operating in ambiguity, grounding ambitious ideas in production reality. You may already be contributing to open-source projects, side projects, or public experiments around AI-driven productivity simply because you can’t help yourself. You treat AI infrastructure as a real production system, deploying agent configurations, orchestration layers, CI/CD, or remote execution environments rather than relying on ad-hoc tooling.

This role is not a fit if you’re primarily interested in pure AI research or model training, short-term advisory work, or automation disconnected from real production engineering. It’s also not a people-management role — for the foreseeable future, you’ll be leading systems and agents, not teams. This position is designed to be deeply collaborative and in-person, with several days per week spent working together onsite in Austin.

What’s On Offer

This is career-defining scope. You’ll help define how teams building mission-critical systems work with AI, with the expectation that much of the thinking, tooling, and even open-source work will eventually be shared publicly.

You’ll spend your days doing what many engineers only get to explore at night — experimenting, learning, and building at the frontier of applied AI. You’ll work alongside an exceptional group of engineers with backgrounds spanning top financial institutions and leading crypto-native organizations.

The role is based in Austin, Texas, with in-person collaboration required. Compensation is competitive, with a base salary in the $200k–$250k range plus equity, depending on experience. Benefits include comprehensive healthcare, retirement contributions, generous time off, and more. The target start date is Q1 2026.