tl;dr: looking for ML researcher with trading experience to build powerful quantitative models that trade and accelerate scientific discovery.
Historically, quantitative models—such as trading models—are domain specific. Brilliant people spend their best years testing features, tuning hyperparameters, and iterating architectures within a narrow domain. But scale is the panacea: large models will find patterns people, and specialized models, could not. Forecasting generalizes.
For now, our models trade.
About You
We’re looking for ML researchers. You’d be joining a team of 4. You may be a good fit if you:
We are a fully in-person company, must be willing to relocate to NYC. Able to sponsor TN or E3 visas.
Historically, quantitative models are domain specific. Brilliant people spend their best years testing features, tuning hyperparameters, and iterating architectures within a narrow domain. But scale is the panacea: large models will find patterns people, and specialized models, could not.
Forecasting generalizes. Zoa trains cross-domain event forecasting engines.
Automating Iteration
LLMs—embedded in multi-agent optimization loops and evaluated against fixed policies—can automate the build-test-improve modeling cycle. Think AlphaEvolve for forecasting problems.
Sample-Efficient General Models
Today’s forecasting models are narrowly crafted with deep human priors. But larger models will outperform state-of-the-art specialized models.
Unlike existing event models, our models leverage data from across contexts and rely less on human intuition. And compared to LLMs, our models are built with more inductive priors and rely more heavily on inference-time compute—improving sample efficiency.
Why It Matters
In the real economy, our models could be useful for forecasting supply chain volatility, energy supply and demand, even earthquake risk.
Science is, Ian Hacking writes, the taming of chance. It is the process of iteratively updating priors (something like: identify uncertainty, conceive experiment to reduce uncertainty, execute, update). If science is uncertainty-reduction, forecasting is a critical measure of progress.
Better forecasting improves our ability to select interesting experiments (roughly those with greatest expected uncertainty reduction) and update priors. Our models will be used by labs and academics in data-heavy domains.
Sam's ex-girlfriend introduced him to Greg back at Carnegie Mellon in 2017, and while that relationship didn't last, their friendship has. After college, Greg went to Harvard Law School, while Sam worked for three years at Jane Street on their Options desk, building & leading a satellite dev team.
Salary
$150,000 - $400,000
Equity
0.1% - 1%
Location
New York, NY
Experience
1+ years
Total raised
$500K
Last stage
Series A
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.