Founding Engineer, Applied AI & Research

Why we are building Zero

Sree: For nearly a decade, personal finance was my second job. I built infrastructure at NVIDIA, founded a company acquired by Harvey, and helped build Harvey’s early engineering team. Through all of it, I spent nights teaching myself how to manage equity, investments, retirement accounts, and taxes. I built spreadsheets, paid advisors, and became the person friends came to with financial questions.

Knowing all that did not protect me. I still missed decisions across my equity and taxes that could have saved me tens of thousands of dollars. I only uncovered these after we built an early version of Zero.

Isaac: My family lost everything in the 2008 crash. I grew up determined to understand how to build and protect financial security, teaching myself about investing at Princeton and eventually making it my career. At Alpine Investors, I worked closely with wealth management and accounting businesses and saw how valuable skilled advice could be. I also saw the catch: you had to know a decision mattered before you knew to ask for help. I knew how easy that moment was to miss: despite everything I’d learned, mistakes with my own investments have cost me more than $50,000.

When we met, we recognized the same pattern in our stories. We had both put in the work to understand our finances, yet consequential decisions still slipped by. Catching those moments takes continuous, coordinated attention – the kind that once required an entire team. We’re building Zero to give everyone that attention: to see the whole picture, identify the right moves at the right time, and help people follow through.

What you will build

Zero is building a financial system that goes beyond answering questions. By combining financial data, deterministic calculations, AI reasoning, and reliable execution, we’re building a system that understands a member’s financial life, identifies opportunities, and helps them act.

You’ll build the intelligence at the center of Zero, developing systems that understand a household’s finances, reason about decisions across time, and proactively identify opportunities. You’ll combine language models, financial calculations, planning, and agentic systems to turn complex financial information into decisions that can be understood, verified, and acted on.

• Build a living model of a household. Develop systems that turn accounts, financial documents, equity, goals, and conversations into a coherent, evolving picture of a member’s finances. Maintain context over time, resolve conflicting information, recognize uncertainty, and determine what the system still needs to know.
• Build financial reasoning and planning systems. Extend Zero’s decision graph to reason across taxes, investments, equity, cash, and long-term goals. Model how decisions interact, compare alternative paths, and evaluate tradeoffs across time, liquidity, risk, and taxes.
• Discover what matters before someone asks. Build systems that continuously monitor a member’s financial situation, identify valuable opportunities and emerging risks, and determine which decisions deserve attention. Estimate their impact in dollars, account for dependencies and timing, and distinguish meaningful actions from noise.
• Build agents that investigate, plan, and act. Give models access to verified financial context, deterministic calculation tools, and the ability to investigate complex questions. Develop agents that can form checkable plans, recognize when more information is needed, and coordinate with execution systems to carry out authorized actions.
• Make financial intelligence measurable. Build evaluations that test whether Zero understands a household correctly, identifies important opportunities, produces financially sound recommendations, and knows when not to act. Turn real member scenarios, edge cases, and production failures into systematic improvements.

Who you are

• You’ve built and shipped systems using language models, and you’ve developed ways to measure their quality, reliability, and failure modes in practice.
• You’re a strong engineer who can design agents, tools, reasoning systems, and evaluations, then turn experimental approaches into reliable production software.
• You’re comfortable working on open-ended problems where the right architecture isn’t obvious. You can break down complex reasoning tasks, form hypotheses, run experiments, and use evidence to guide your decisions.
• You understand the strengths and limits of language models. You know when a model should reason, when deterministic code should calculate, and when a human needs to make the decision.
• You care about correctness, not just plausible outputs. You think about missing information, uncertainty, conflicting evidence, and how to make a system’s conclusions verifiable.
• You’re motivated to understand the financial domain deeply. You’ll work with real member cases and learn enough about taxes, investing, and wealth management to recognize when the system’s understanding or recommendations are wrong. Prior financial experience is a plus.
• You move quickly between research and implementation, share what you learn, and enjoy solving difficult problems with a small team. Early-stage startup experience is a plus.

Why join Zero

• Work on the financial decisions that shape people’s lives. You’ll help members respond well to emergencies, support their families, build wealth, and plan for the future.
• Join an extraordinary team. You’ll work with people who are among the best at what they do and ambitious about what we can build together. We challenge ideas directly, share context, and help one another get better.
• Build the intelligence behind an always-on wealth manager. You’ll help Zero understand a household, plan across years, find the opportunities that matter, and follow through on members’ decisions.
• Help shape what Zero becomes. You’ll work directly with us and with members to decide what matters, then build the decision systems at the center of the product.

Compensation and process

Base salary is $250K–$350K, set by level. We will not offer below $250K for this role. You’ll also receive equity.

Benefits include 100% coverage for health, dental, and vision, plus 80% health coverage for dependents. They also include a 401(k), commuter benefits, daily meals, and the tools you need to do your best work.

Apply using the form below. If there’s a fit, your first conversation is a 30-minute informal chat with Sree. We move quickly and tailor the rest of the process to your circumstances, so you can get a real feel for the work and the team.