Senior AI Engineer to Define the Next Decade of Trading Education

Who We Are The Trading Academy and The Trading Cafe are helping thousands of students realise financial freedom through the most comprehensive and effective trading education on the planet. Founded in 2022, based in Hong Kong, the UK, and the USA, The Trading Cafe and The Trading Academy were created by a group of education experts and professional traders with a mission to be the number one education platform in the world. The Trading Cafe currently has over 92,000 members and The Trading Academy has over 2400 active students. Our student progress and performance are tracked closely and those who properly follow our process are consistently achieving profitability. Our goal is to keep improving the systems that help more students reach that level. Who We Are Looking For We believe AI is a paradigm shift in education, coaching, and student support, and we are building it into the core of how our students learn and improve. We're hiring the person who's going to lead the next phase of our AI work and build it into something groundbreaking. We are looking for the right person who's going to architect our entire AI and data layer over the coming years and keep us at the cutting edge of AI in education. This is what you will take ownership over: An analytics layer built on data nobody else has. We have years of student behavior, thousands of hours of lectures, tens of thousands of completed projects, and nearly 7000 submitted questions from students with answers from instructors. We want to integrate all data in our business and use it to improve and refine every department. A memory layer that grows with each student. Tools that genuinely know who they are talking to, what they've shared, what they're struggling with, how they've changed, and use that to help them grow and develop. More AI products. We already have 2 customer-facing AIs in production, the first trained on nearly 2,000 hours of our video content, which accurately answers students' technical questions. The second is a life coach; details on that below.. We're going all in on AI and want infrastructure that lets us rapidly prototype and ship high-quality tools. Our goal is to build something so useful that students don't want to leave us and so powerful that others want to copy us. This is not a prompt-only role or a no-code chatbot role. We need someone who can understand the full system, make strong technical decisions, and ship production-quality work to a deadline. You should be comfortable taking ownership without needing every step mapped out for you. We will give you context, clear goals, full support and access to the systems, but we are looking for someone who can think independently, identify what matters and bring their experience to the table to push projects forward to the highest level. If the fit is strong, this is not a single project. The first project is a paid trial so we can see how you work and you can see how we work. From there, the path is to take increasing ownership over our AI systems and help build the AI department with us. The First Project We have a life coach who gives mindset and psychological advice to students learning to trade. It draws on a personality quiz each student completes, and gives genuinely personalised help. It's in production and working well. We were in the middle of upgrading it with: Voice chat through LiveKit Integrated logins across our other AI services Access to the full personality report, not just the scores A persistent memory layer that grows and develops with each student Most of that is done already. What's left is migrating our existing student reports into the new memory layer and tightening up the memory system itself. We have detailed handover docs for every part of it. Our current memory layer runs on Postgres and pgvector, and we want to extend it into something that actually grows alongside each student. Are you the right person? You'll know this role is a fit if: You've shipped LLM products to real users, not just built prototypes You have an opinion on memory architectures and can defend it You've been the senior person on a small team before and liked it You want to architect, not just implement You're more interested in a Head of AI seat at a real company than in a higher hourly rate for a faceless contract This probably isn't a fit if: You want a tightly scoped contract with clear handoff at the end You prefer working under a senior engineer rather than being one Your strongest work is in computer vision or classical ML rather than LLM systems Compensation We'll start with a paid technical trial scoped around delivery of the upgraded TAL with memory. Likely 10-20 hours, paid at $50-150 per hour depending on experience. For the longer-term role, compensation will be structured based on scope: senior contractor, fractional AI lead, or full-time Head of AI path. How to Apply Please provide your resume Please answer the following questions: Where are you located? In brief, what is your background with LLM systems in production? What is a specific piece of work you have completed that you would point us to first? A student has spent 100 hours talking to our life coach over six months. We want the agent to feel like it genuinely knows them. It should recall meaningful things they've shared, notice patterns over time, and let its understanding of them evolve, without context bloat, hallucinated memories, or stale information getting in the way of a present conversation. How would you architect the memory? Tell us about a technical decision you made in the last two years that you later regretted. What did you do differently afterwards? When you join a new codebase, what's your process in the first week? What kind of working environment makes you do your best work? What kind drains you? What makes you interested in this role specifically, versus other AI engineering work you could be doing right now? If we spoke with other people who you have worked with, how would they describe you? What's your expected hourly rate for the trial project? (We have stated $50-$150 an hour, where do you sit in the range and why?) The next step will be a 15 minute interview. Project Requirements AI Layer Prompt engineering RAG Memory architecture Agent frameworks like LangGraph Evals Data Layer PostgreSQL Pgvector Postgres Row-Level Security Database migration Languages Python FastAPI Typescript/JavaScript React SQL HTML/CSS Voice Layer LiveKit STT/TTS pipelines Elevenlabs Infrastructure Layer Render Cloudflare Cloudflare R2 Sentry Authentication Layer Authentication system Role-based access control Data isolation