We're looking for a founding software engineer/quant dev

Hey, we're Sebastian & Rayane, the founders of Kairos.

We're building systems that predict sports outcomes (accurately, we hope). To do this, we're putting together a core team of highly technical quants/software engineers/quant devs, one of which could be you!

What we actually do (and why it's fun)

Let's say Mbappé is slightly injured but he might still play tonight's game. What's the impact of the injury report on the probability that he scores? What's the impact on the overall probability of Real Madrid winning the game? Or let's say Djokovic is going to play the US Open semi-final against Alcaraz at 3pm local time. It's probably going to be quite warm at around 30°C. How does that impact his chances of moving onto the final and going for a 25th Grand Slam?

We try and give good answers to these kinds of questions. We ingest lots of data, build models to make sense of all of it, and generate forecasts. We then use these forecasts in systematic and quantitative trading strategies.

Your role: founding software engineer/quant dev

The cursor between more "traditional" software engineering and quantitative development depends on your expertise. We are a small engineering team though, so fluency across the stack is necessary.

What you'll work on

• Infrastructure and data pipelines that scale to hundreds of millions of events/day
• Reliable trade execution systems that can handle low-latency requirements across exchanges
• Productionizing ML models, from training to deployment
• Owning the end-to-end prod development of a quantitative trading strategy
• The lakehouse and backtesting frameworks the rest of the team builds on

What might be useful

You'll need to move across the stack while being able to deep dive quickly. You should probably like technology. We're not attached to any particular language or framework, we think great engineers can figure new ones out. That said, here are some things that might be useful (we don't expect you to master each area):

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience in Python/Rust/C++
• A background in computer science, mathematics, physics, or other quantitative fields - you should be able to argue about a forecast
• Data engineering fundamentals (columnar and table formats like Parquet or Iceberg, time-series databases like QuestDB, SQL)
• Experience taking ML models to production (reproducible training pipelines, experiment tracking with MLflow or similar, model versioning, monitoring models once they're live)
• Hands-on experience with basic dev ops (Terraform, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, Cloud platforms)
• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, AWS CloudWatch)
• Familiarity with market data: orderbooks, market orders, fees, etc.

Are we a good fit?

We're an early-stage startup, working in-person from Paris. So beyond the traits that mean you'd enjoy working on the above you need to be pretty comfortable with uncertainty. So, you should join us if:

• Early-stage ownership sounds exciting, you're comfortable with taking on more risk for a big upside
• You value intellectual freedom and personal agency
• You want to work with smart people, who move fast
• You're competitive (in sports, games, …)
• You want to grow with the company - both professionally and financially (we offer competitive pay and real ownership as this will be your baby too)
• Bonus: you enjoy sports, company events may include sports games & we often practice sports together

How to apply

Email us at draftpicks@kairos-research.ai with your CV / portfolio. Even better if you have an anecdote around sports and/or forecasting 😁

Don't self-reject! You don't need to know everything about sports, domain knowledge is easy to teach.

PS If this doesn't sound like you but you know just the right gal/guy, we'd appreciate the intro (and buy you 2 tickets to your favorite sports event)