Software Engineer Intern

Vigil Labs builds AI to solve markets, starting with agents that supercharge discretionary traders. To commercialize our technology, we operate an eight-figure hedge fund. We're backed by Ribbit Capital, Nova, Lux Capital, SV Angel and others ($29M seed), and our team spans Citadel, Millennium, xAI and SIG, alongside AI/ML researchers from CMU, Cornell, Stanford and Princeton.

The role

Our traders make decisions with real money on the line, all day, inside Sentinel — our AI-native trading terminal. Behind it runs a lot of machinery: agents reading markets and news, narrative and alerting pipelines, forecasts, risk and execution systems. The interface's job is to make all of that intuitive: show a trader what matters, when it matters, in a form they can trust and act on in seconds.

You'll build that interface side by side with the traders who use it. You'll sit with them, learn how they actually work, turn what you see into web applications that make complex systems clear, and ship — often the same day. The next morning you'll watch it get used, and make it better.

This is an internship. We're not looking for someone who has done it all already. We're looking for someone with real drive: who ships fast, learns fast, and wants the most demanding users they'll ever have.

We'll trust you to

• Work directly with traders. Understand their workflow and the decision behind every request, put a rough version in front of them fast, and iterate on what they tell you. Own outcomes, not features.

• Build the trading surface. The screens traders execute from, fast and predictable under pressure: order tickets that price more clearly, sizing straight from the live position, one-click presets for the way they work an order, and a message the moment an order can't go through.

• Build tools for reading markets. Interactive charts traders plan trades on directly — measure moves, mark entry, target and stop, move across timeframes — that remember how each person likes to work.

• Make our AI systems visible. Live views of what our agents, narrative pipelines and alerts are doing and why: the dashboards, review tools and visualizations that let traders and researchers see and steer the system, not just read its outputs.

• Own it all the way down. When something on screen looks wrong, follow it through front end, API and data to the real cause and fix it there. Keep everything you ship fast and working.

You might be a fit if

• You're a current university student (we'd especially like to hear from Stanford and Berkeley students who can be in Palo Alto), or at a similar stage.

• You've shipped things people use — side projects, internship work, a hackathon app that stuck, a tool your club runs on. Links matter more to us than your resume.

• You're comfortable across a web stack — a TypeScript front end, a Python back end and SQL — or you pick up what you're missing quickly. You can turn a one-line request into a deployed change without waiting for a spec.

• You care how software feels to use. You notice the extra click, the slow load, the chart that hides the one number someone needed — and you can't leave it alone.

• You'd rather ship ten useful things this week than one perfect thing next month. Good taste helps; perfection isn't the goal.

• You can sit across from a demanding user, take blunt feedback, and come back an hour later with something better.

• You use Claude Code / Codex every day — and you can explain, change and debug everything they write for you.

• You're curious about markets. No finance background needed: you'll learn more about how professional traders work in a month here than in a year of reading about it.

• You have a growth mindset. We're all still learning, and we expect you to be too.

Bonus points

• You've built data visualizations, dashboards, real-time apps, or anything on live data.

• You've used TradingView or a broker terminal, or built a trading bot for fun.

• Hackathon wins, open source, or a product with real users.

Logistics

• Full time, in person in Palo Alto (2151 Park Blvd). Expect long hours — this is an intense, fast-moving team.

• Pay: $250K/yr annualized, plus other benefits (e.g., housing).

• Timeline: we're looking for the right person, not the fastest hire, but we're looking to bring that person on as soon as possible and are happy to discuss details for the right fit.

• If the work keeps growing and it's a fit, the internship can turn into a full-time role.