Backend Engineer (W2 Only)

You will be the Backend Engineer (AI Backend) wiring up cutting-edge AI models to real-world investment data, building the core backend that lets portfolio managers and operations teams safely use AI in their day-to-day decisions.

You will join a specialist consultancy working with leading financial institutions to build high-performance technology in complex, highly regulated environments. For this assignment you’ll be embedded in a major asset manager's Multi-Asset Investing Technology team, which is evolving beyond a traditional fund-of-funds model into direct investing, SMAs, quantitative strategies and private markets, driving a large increase in data volume and complexity.

The Technology team is building AI capabilities on top of the firm’s data platform so investment, risk and operations teams can work faster with their own research and data. You will sit in the AI Backend workstream, creating the plumbing between AI models, Snowflake and the clients research documents so AI tools can be used safely at scale.

What You'll Do

Design, build and maintain MCP servers and integrations that expose data sources and internal applications to AI assistants and agents. Develop Snowflake plug-ins and data access layers with robust SQL, Snowpark or similar, ensuring correct entitlements and governance. Build document-processing pipelines for research content (memos, models, call notes, PDFs, Word, Excel), including parsing, chunking, metadata tagging, embeddings and retrieval (RAG). Ship production-grade backend services and APIs with strong testing, CI/CD, monitoring, logging and cost/performance tuning, and produce runbooks and knowledge-transfer materials to support handover. Provision and manage cloud infrastructure as code on AWS, using tools such as Terraform. Collaborate directly with investment, risk and operations stakeholders to turn their workflows into reliable AI tools and iterate based on output quality.

What You'll Bring

Around 7 years of professional software engineering experience as expected for a Backend Engineer (AI Backend), with a strong backend focus. Excellent Python skills and experience building backend services and REST or streaming APIs. Hands-on experience building LLM applications, including tool/function calling, RAG, embeddings, vector search and prompt/evaluation design. Solid Snowflake experience and strong SQL and data-engineering capabilities. Experience with TypeScript/Node.js in production environments. Cloud experience (AWS preferred), including containers, Git-based CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Terraform. Clear, confident communication skills and the ability to collaborate with non-technical business stakeholders.

What's On Offer

Day rate between $720 and $960 per day for this Backend Engineer (AI Backend) role, on a 6 month contract. Hybrid working pattern in New York, with 3 days per week in the office. Immediate start is available for the right engineer. You will play a key role in the AI Backend workstream, building the core integrations and pipelines that make AI safely usable for front-office investment teams. You’ll work on high-impact, production-grade AI systems in a leading global asset management environment, shaping how AI interacts with complex financial data. You’ll gain deep exposure to enterprise AI tooling, modern data platforms and multi-asset investing workflows while working alongside top-tier technologists and investors.

If you are excited by connecting AI models to real financial data and research at scale, this Backend Engineer (AI Backend) contract offers a high-impact platform for your next contract.

Key Information Job Title: Backend Engineer (AI Backend) (Contract) Location: New York, United States Work Policy: hybrid Day Rate: $720 - $960/day Duration: 6 month contract

Consortia is a specialist recruitment agency with consultants focused on global roles within UX, Product, Data, and Engineering markets. If this contract in New York, United States doesn't align with your preferences, but you are open to exploring other opportunities, please still register by applying to this role so we can match you to other requirements.

Due to the high volume of applications, we may not be able to respond individually. However, we will keep your details on file and reach out when a more suitable opportunity arises.

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