Founding Member of Technical Staff — Markets
About the job
- Exceptional software engineering ability, particularly in Python and/or C++
- Experience with quantitative development, trading systems, data infrastructure, or systematic research
- Internship experience at a quantitative trading firm is a strong plus
- Strong statistical intuition and comfort working with noisy real-world data
- Ability to move quickly from an ambiguous idea to something working
- Deep, personal interest in markets — you trade, build strategies, follow markets obsessively, or have serious independent projects to show for it
- Build pipelines for market, alternative, and real-time data
- Research, build, and evaluate trading signals
- Build tooling that lets us go from an idea to a live experiment extremely quickly
- Develop research and backtesting infrastructure
- Turn research prototypes into reliable production systems
- Work directly with quantitative and AI researchers on new approaches to market prediction
- Own important parts of the trading stack from day one
- Coming out of an internship at IMC, Citadel, Jane Street, HRT, Optiver, or a similar firm and want significantly more ownership
- A new grad who has spent college building trading systems or doing quantitative research
- A strong engineer who became obsessed with markets and taught yourself the quantitative side
- Someone who would rather build the trading firm than be employee #500 at one
About the company
Vigil Labs is a team with backgrounds from xAI and Citadel, IMO medalists, and top ranked crypto and Polymarket traders building AI for markets. Their research lab builds technology at first to supercharge our own traders, and ultimately build a prediction engine that can enable the world to see the future better. This technology is currently deployed internally through an initial 8 figure hedge fund, anchored by the founder of IMC trading. They recently had our 20m seed round led by Ribbit Capital, with other investors include Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Nova, and many angels from the Silicon Valley and finance space (Don Wilson - founder of DRW, CEO of Kalshi, Founders of DoorDash and Ramp)
Company Size
1-10
Company Stage
Seed
Total Funding
$5.7M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2025
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Vigil raised a $20 million seed round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Lux, Valor, Nova, and founders of DoorDash, Ramp, and Kalshi.
- The team brings elite backgrounds from xAI and Citadel, alongside IMO medalists and top-ranked prediction market traders building AI for markets.
- Its prediction engine technology is actively deployed through an internal 8-figure hedge fund anchored by the founder of IMC Trading.
What critics are saying
- Vigil remains a tiny team; no public customers or revenue exist by August 2026.
- Crypto trading alpha decays fast; competitors copy data pipelines and reasoning workflows.
- If bitcoin and altcoin volumes slump, Vigil’s first market vanishes.
What makes Vigil Labs unique
- Kole Lee combines crypto profits, Pantera experience, and Stanford Blockchain credibility.
- Vigil trains reasoning systems on social media, Reddit, and predictive markets.
- The product augments traders instead of replacing them, targeting live-market decision speed.
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Company News
Kole Lee dropped out of Stanford and raised $5.7 million to build Vigil Labs, developing real-time reasoning systems designed to empower a new breed of “bionic” traders.
The post Vigil Labs AI Raises $5.7 Million To Build Bionic Traders appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Vigil’s founder and CEO, Kole Lee, dropped out of Stanford to start what may become the world’s largest hedge fund, powered by real time data from proprietary sources, and a reasoning system specifically trained to advise and augment human traders. His first customer is himself. Lee is literally betting his fortune on his startup. Calder White, CTO (left), Kole Lee, CEO (center) and Daniel Nunes (right) in the Vigil Palo Alto office Vigil Lee is a former teenage magician who once performed for Silicon Valley luminaries, he traces his interest in computing back to his grandmother, one of UCLA’s first Fortran programmers. In high school, he started building his personal wealth by trading equities, but soon gravitated toward crypto. He interned at Pantera Capital, led Stanford’s Blockchain Club, and turned a small personal crypto stake into a fortune. “I’ve always believed that markets reward intelligence and adaptability,” he said. “AI is the purest way to scale those qualities.” In 2024, Lee made headlines when he persuaded the student-run Blyth Fund to allocate seven percent of its portfolio to Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $42,000. The move drew national attention and over a million views across social platforms. “It was a lesson in conviction and timing,” Lee told me. “Markets are intelligence games. The edge comes from who can see the signals first and act with confidence.” Getty creative loves the idea of a superhero trading equities and crypto. getty The key to the system is where Vigil gets its data. It supplements traditional sources that everyone uses with a proprietary combination of data gleaned from diverse sources, like social media, Reddit, and predictive markets, the sum of which, Lee admitted, is their own “black box.” Instead of training an LLM, the company is building infrastructure to…