About Specter
We started Specter with a vision of building the Bloomberg of private markets. We acknowledge that is a lofty ambition and are still very much at the beginning of our journey. However, you won't find many companies that spend as much time as we do – thinking about the edge in the private markets. We can't really say, but it may be one of the reasons why over 300 leading VC and PE firms use Specter every day to discover actionable insights.
Engineering at Specter
As a small, fast-moving team, we take pride in our ability to ship quickly and effectively. You'll be joining us at an exciting time as we need to both scale to meet increasing demand and have the opportunity to create magical new product experiences on top of our industry-leading data with AI.
We're proud to move fast. Check out our release notes to see what's new on the product side—but there's just as much happening behind the scenes.
We also love AI both in our products and workflows, and take testing pretty seriously as with 20+ data sources there are otherwise always problems that sneak in.
We are also proud that our data is used to find & invest in some truly awesome companies by our clients.
The Role
We're looking for an AI Engineer to build out the agentic capabilities of Specter. This is primarily an engineering role – you'll be shipping production AI features.
We launched our AI Search Agent last year, and are now ready to take it much further. You'll be building the next generation of AI-powered experiences that help investors discover and research companies in ways that weren't possible before.
What you'll build:
Conversational AI interfaces within the product together with the frontend team
Tool use and function calling to expose Specter's capabilities to AI agents
Intelligent orchestration combining our proprietary data with web search and external sources
Deep search features that can find and synthesize very specific data across our data and web data
Evaluation frameworks to measure and improve agent performance
The underlying infrastructure to make these experiences fast and reliable
You'll sit within the backend team and work closely with our existing FastAPI codebase, extending it to support increasingly sophisticated AI workflows. The AI landscape moves fast – new models and frameworks emerge constantly – and we want someone who's excited to experiment, benchmark, and ship.
**Here are a few of the key people you'd be interacting with:
Henry** has architected our new Python backend and all client-facing APIs. With his vast experience he's a true unicorn, working across databases, frontend, backend, and infrastructure to make sure everything ties together nicely.
Josh leads the frontend team and has built and designed the majority of the product over the course of his close to 3 year tenure at Specter.
Jan both product manages the team and builds the first prototypes for many of our new features, such as network tracking or our AI agent. He brings experience as a serial founder in data and trading.
Who you are
We're looking for someone who gets excited about building AI systems that deliver real value to users – not AI for AI's sake. You take ownership and care deeply about the real-world impact of what you build.
You have:
Strong Python experience, ideally with FastAPI or similar frameworks
Hands-on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) – prompt engineering, tool use, and RAG patterns
Familiarity with agentic frameworks (Pydantic AI, LangChain, or similar)
Solid SQL skills – our AI features need to interact intelligently with our databases
Some previous exposure to traditional ML models
Experience with vector databases and embedding-based retrieval
A habit of keeping up with the rapidly evolving AI landscape and experimenting with new tools
A big plus:
Experience building production AI features (not just prototypes)
TypeScript experience to collaborate effectively with the frontend team
A plus:
Experience with ClickHouse or similar column-oriented databases
Familiarity with infrastructure and DevOps
Previous work in data-intensive products
Our Hiring Process
Initial chat to discuss the role, learn about each other and explore whether it's a good fit
Coding exercise - a domain-specific exercise that doesn't require any preparation. No white-boarding!
One-hour general technical interview [+ exercise review]
Final interview - a chance to have a general discussion, meet the rest of the team and make sure we're the perfect fit for each other. You'll have learnt more about us by this stage, and this is a chance to have any remaining questions answered!
How to Apply
We'd love to hear from you no matter who you are or where you are! If you are interested and want to join Specter, you can email us at careers@tryspecter.com.
Please include:
Include the role's title in your subject line
Send links that best showcase the relevant things you've built and done
Bonus: share something AI-related you've built or experimented with recently
Please note that we are doing interviews on a rolling basis.