Senior AI Engineer

About Us:

Founded 20 years ago and headquartered in Chicago, the DV Group of financial services firms has grown to more than 600 people operating throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Since spinning out of a large brokerage firm in 2016, DV Trading has rapidly scaled as an independent proprietary trading firm utilizing its own capital, trading strategies, and risk management methodologies to provide liquidity to worldwide financial markets and hedging opportunities to commodity producers and users. Now, DV group affiliates include two broker dealers, a cryptocurrency market making firm, and a bourgeoning investment adviser.

Overview:

DV Trading is building a centralized AI function and is now hiring for the model layer. The long-term goal is for DV to own its model capability — not to be permanently dependent on what frontier providers choose to offer, at what price, for how long. This role is how that happens: fine-tuning and distilling open-weight models for DV-specific tasks, operating the inference infrastructure to run them on-prem, and building the model gateway that routes intelligently across open and closed providers. The near-term result is lower cost and better latency. The long-term result is a firm that controls its own AI stack.

Job Responsibilities:

Build and operate a model gateway routing inference across open and closed models with cost, latency, and quality tracking

Design and run distillation pipelines: use frontier model outputs to generate training data for task-specific open models

Fine-tune and evaluate open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, Mistral, or similar) for DV-specific tasks

Deploy and maintain on-prem inference infrastructure (vLLM, TGI, or equivalent) on KubernetesBuild model evaluation frameworks for quality, cost, latency, and regression

Define criteria and tooling for model selection: when open models are production-ready vs. when to use closed APIs

Partner with the agent engineering team to ensure the model layer meets agent workload

Requirements:

5+ years software engineering; strong Python

Production fine-tuning or distillation of open-weight models (not just inference API wrappers)

Experience serving LLMs on-prem (vLLM, TGI, Triton, or equivalent)

Experience managing GPU infrastructure (provisioning, scheduling, utilization monitoring) in a production environment

Model evaluation and regression testing in production

Kubernetes and GPU workload management

Strong grasp of the tradeoffs between open and closed models across cost, quality, latency, and data sensitivity

Preferred:

Quantization, PEFT/LoRA, or other efficient training techniques

Model gateway or inference proxy design (routing, fallback, rate limiting)

Financial services or other regulated/sensitive-data environments

Familiarity with the open model ecosystem (Hugging Face, model cards, licensing

Benefits:

Discretionary bonus eligibility

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

HSA, FSA, and Dependent Care Options

Employer Paid Group Term Life and AD&D insurance

Voluntary LTD, Life & AD&D insurance

Flexible Vacation policy

Retirement plan with employer match

The range below reflects the expected base salary for this position. It represents a good-faith estimate of the base pay we anticipate offering, with actual compensation determined by your experience, education, skills, and performance throughout the interview process. This role is also eligible for a discretionary bonus (at DV Trading's discretion) and DV Trading's benefits package, including the benefits listed above.

Base Salary Range

$200,000 - $300,000 USD