Associate

We are global private markets specialists delivering tailored investment solutions, advisory services, and impactful, data driven insights to the world’s investors. Leveraging the power of our platform and our peerless intelligence across sectors, strategies, and geographies, we help identify the advantages and the answers our clients need to succeed.

Position Overview:

The Senior Associate, AI Deployment & Production will be a senior member of the Applied Engineering Solutions team within StepStone’s DATS department. This person is an expert Python engineer who helps the AI research team write better code and brings their work to robust production. They own the productionization framework around AI solutions — a clean, well-designed package API, async orchestrators (Celery or equivalent), sensible REST endpoints, and the data models the solution requires — and review AI projects to raise code quality. The role also carries low-level language depth (C, C++, or Rust) used for optimization, including rewriting performance-critical paths and migrating business logic out of the firm’s PHP systems into faster implementations. This role suits an engineer who is equally strong at software design, productionization, and performance work.

Essential Job Functions:

• Review AI research projects and raise the quality of their Python code design (module/class/function structure, typing, testing, packaging)
• Build out the production framework for AI solutions: a well-designed package/library API, async scalable orchestrators, coherent REST endpoints, and the data models the solution requires
• Take research and prototype AI code to scalable, reliable production, owning quality and standards before release
• Apply low-level language skills (C, C++, or Rust) to optimize performance-critical paths as needed
• Lead optimization of the firm’s PHP workloads: implement low-level alternatives where warranted, or re-architect so Python (or a low-level service) owns the business logic and PHP simply calls it
• Partner with QA to define and meet testing and acceptance goals; build monitoring and validation around AI pipelines
• Contribute to shared frameworks (private PyPI/polyrepo packaging) and DevOps (GitHub Actions, Helm-based deployment)
• Mentor analysts and associates and act as a senior reviewer for AI and engineering work

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer science, Engineering, a quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience
• 6+ years of software/data engineering experience, including production ownership and demonstrable technical leadership or mentorship