About Predictive Text Labs
PTL builds AI that predicts the future. Our hybrid reasoning engine has achieved a Brier score of 0.121, beating human superforecasters. We're backed by Blackbird Ventures and notable angels, including Balaji Srinivasan, Synthesia founders, and Supabase founders.
To get there, we need a platform engineer whose mandate is to make our prediction-to-trade runtime reliable, reproducible, observable, and safe to evolve.
The role
You will own PTL's prediction-to-trade runtime: the platform that runs forecasting pipelines, persists auditable reasoning traces, supports backtests and live/paper evaluations, and turns forecasts into trade intents, alerts, and broker-executed orders.
This is not a generic developer role and not a pure infrastructure role. You will work across API contracts, event streams, state machines, background orchestration, database schemas, broker adapters, reconciliation, observability, and deployment safety.
What you'll do
- Own runtime correctness across prediction batches, prediction stages, pipeline specs, schedule runs, question snapshots, strategy states, target snapshots, order records, fills, positions, and audit events.
- Harden orchestration across Trigger.dev: retries, idempotency, deterministic run keys, cancellation, lock strategy, failure classification, replay, and safe recovery.
- Own API and event contracts across multiple repos: SSE events, OpenAPI/Zod schemas, structured artifacts, and stage/agent attribution.
- Build headless prediction and evaluation workflows: scheduled batches, locked datasets, live-market and paper-trading probes, benchmark runs, and operator controls.
- Build production observability: structured logs, Sentry, OpenTelemetry, pino, provider and tool-call timing, run-level dashboards, cost and token tracking, actionable alerts, and incident workflows.
- Maintain data integrity across market ingestion, resolution syncing, cutoff dates, snapshot coverage, multi-choice market semantics, and source-specific schema quirks.
- Support leakage-safe research workflows: frozen evidence, cutoff-date validation, trace replay, postmortem capture, and experiment-card audit trails.
- Maintain deployment and environment hygiene across Vercel, Supabase, Trigger.dev, Doppler, AWS/EC2, and Cloudflare/SSM.
- Improve platform velocity: contract tests, replay and regression harnesses, local-to-prod parity, paper-trade smoke tests, and reduction of flaky behavior.
- Partner with Research, Data Science, Data Infrastructure, and Trading to turn evolving research logic into stable runtime contracts. You will not own the research thesis; you will own the systems that make research executable, measurable, and safe.
Requirements
- Strong TypeScript/Node backend engineering experience in production systems with real operational risk.
- Experience designing stateful workflows where correctness depends on explicit status transitions, idempotency, and auditability.
- Deep familiarity with Postgres-backed systems: schema design, migrations, constraints, indexes, RLS and auth boundaries, and data-quality checks.
- Experience with asynchronous orchestration: queues, scheduled jobs, retries, cancellation, replay, compensating actions, and dead-letter or manual recovery paths.
- Strong API and event-contract instincts: OpenAPI/Zod-style schemas, SSE or other streaming protocols, versioning, backward compatibility, and structured artifacts.
- Practical observability experience: structured logs, tracing, Sentry or equivalent, dashboarding, alerting, and incident diagnosis.
- Ability to work across app, runtime, and integration layers in one codebase without losing architectural discipline.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development in large TypeScript systems; able to use agents and code assistants productively without sacrificing review discipline.
- Strong product judgment under uncertainty: you can ship pragmatic runtime improvements while preserving correctness in high-stakes paths.
- Ability to partner with research and data teams and translate evolving experimental logic into stable production contracts.
Nice to have
- Experience with Supabase, Trigger.dev, Drizzle, Hono, Next.js, or similar TypeScript runtime stacks.
- Experience with trading systems, broker APIs, prediction markets, exchange APIs, order lifecycle management, or execution-critical fintech systems.
- Experience with event-sourced or audit-ledger style systems: order events, fills, positions, reconciliation, or payment-state machines.
- Familiarity with LLM pipelines, tool-calling, structured outputs, reasoning traces, or model-evaluation infrastructure.
- Familiarity with ClickHouse or other OLAP systems and where analytical vs transactional boundaries should live.
- Experience building deterministic replay or regression frameworks for workflows with external providers.
- Experience with leakage-safe backtesting, frozen data snapshots, or time-consistent evaluation.
Why PTL
- Australia's highest powered team. Our founding team consists of Australia's Kaggle champion, SIG's Australia's top equities analyst, PhDs who reached 6th in ARC-AGI, and the founder of a time series foundation model lab. Our co-founders include the founder of Netlify, one of the world's largest DevOps unicorns, the creator of DLFinLab, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Alumini
- Real traction. Our forecasting system already outperforms human superforecasters in internal and live evaluation.
- High-leverage role. You own the runtime that connects forecasting, backtesting, evaluation, and trade execution.
- Technically dense domain across AI reasoning, prediction markets, trading systems, data quality, and reliability engineering.
- Compounding research loop. You will build the infrastructure that makes traces, evals, postmortems, paper and live probes, and production feedback compound over time.
- Small, senior team with high ownership and fast iteration.
- Backed by top-tier investors and operators.
- Remote-friendly with Sydney and San Francisco presence.
How to apply
Send your resume and a brief note covering:
- A production workflow you owned that required strict state transitions and idempotent background execution. What broke, how did you detect it, and how did you harden it?
- An incident where async orchestration — queues, jobs, webhooks, or streaming — caused user-facing, operational, or financial risk. How did you mitigate it and prevent recurrence?
- Design a recovery path for this scenario: a prediction batch is running, the SSE stream disconnects, the model provider times out, partial stage artifacts have been persisted, and a downstream trade alert depends on the final probability. What should the system persist, retry, replay, suppress, and alert on?
- How would you evolve a human-in-the-loop paper trading stack into a reliability-first live trading platform without losing developer velocity or operator control?
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