The Hiring Profile: Engineers Who Know Wealth
Avantos.ai, a 2024-founded AI company with 37 mapped employees and $35 million in fresh Series A capital, Business Wire reported, hires like a financial-services firm that happens to write code. The question for candidates isn't whether they can code or model; it's whether they understand the industry they're automating. The company leans heavily on technical talent, operates a largely remote workforce, and runs a structured hiring process that gives a prepared candidate a clear path through it.
Headcount tells the story. InsideOrg's latest snapshot shows 37 people: 18 in engineering, four in product, two in design, one each in data and HR. The rest cluster in client-facing and go-to-market roles. That ratio hasn't shifted since the seed round closed in September 2024. The Series A, which raised $35 million and was announced with a mandate for "additional AI agents and deeper integrations with custodians, CRMs, portfolio management tools, underwriting systems and policy administration platforms," simply doubled down on the same roadmap.
Engineering splits under two directors: Fares Beainy, Founding Director of Engineering, and Rachna Vyas, Director of Engineering. A Senior DevOps Engineer posted as fully remote signals that infrastructure talent need not sit in New York. A Production Support Specialist in Novi Sad, Serbia, confirms a distributed model for operations-heavy roles. On product, Karen Narang leads AI Products while Nadim Tawileh heads Product; Nicholas Evans runs Design with two senior openings (Senior Product Designer and Principal Designer, both New York). The design team is small and senior; Evans is the only mapped design lead.
Recent wealth-leadership hires sharpen the profile. Hemang Bhojani joined as Head of Wealth Solutions and Thomas Moore as Head of Wealth Go-to-Market in September 2026, both from Morgan Stanley and similar institutional backgrounds. Their hiring mirrors what Bessemer's Eric Kaplan flagged in the Series A announcement: the founders (Chaptini and Ramadi, both Co-Founder & CEO) "bring rare empathy and insight from building enterprise software for these same institutions." They recruit people who have lived the workflows Avantos automates.
That domain filter appears in every client-facing role. The board lists an Account Director, Wealth (New York) and a Principal, Product & Client Solutions (New York). Ryan Jennings, Head of Client Solutions, oversees a function that partners directly with asset managers, private banks, insurance carriers, broker-dealers, independent RIAs, and custodians: the full wealth ecosystem. Candidates without that fluency don't reach the onsite.
Hiatt Baker, Head of Talent, runs a lean recruiting operation (one mapped HR seat). Public posts emphasize "scaling AI agents across the advisor stack" and "expanding reach across RIAs, independent broker-dealers and enterprise wealth firms." The language is deliberate: they need engineers who can ship agentic systems, product people who can translate advisor pain into roadmap, and commercial hires who speak the language of fiduciary duty and compliance. The overlap is the hire.
Experience skews senior. Of six board postings captured, four carry "Senior" or "Principal" titles. The Production Support Specialist in Novi Sad is the outlier, and even that role supports a platform enterprise wealth firms depend on daily. Avantos doesn't run a junior program; it buys experience. The 51–200 employee range on LinkedIn suggests the mapped 37 is a subset, but the functional proportions hold: engineering-heavy, domain-deep, top-weighted.
Compensation: What the Numbers Show
Avantos closed a $25 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners in February 2026, with Guardian, SEI, and Vanguard participating. A follow-on exempt offering added $10 million later that year. That capital structure means equity is real (not lottery-ticket hypotheticals), but public compensation data is thin. Levels.fyi shows a single reported data point as of September 2026: a Product Manager at $201,000 median total compensation ($166,000–$236,000 range). The site also reports that same $201,000 as the median across all job families, suggesting the sample is effectively one role repeated. Treat it as a floor for senior product hires, not a company-wide benchmark.
The board's live postings, the freshest signal, list six open roles as of late September 2026. Only one publishes a number.
| Role | Location | Posted compensation |
|---|---|---|
| Principal, Product & Client Solutions | New York City | $8–12 / hour |
| Account Director, Wealth | New York City | Not disclosed |
| Production Support Specialist | Novi Sad | Not disclosed |
| Senior DevOps Engineer | Remote | Not disclosed |
| Senior Product Designer | New York City | Not disclosed |
| Principal Designer | New York City | Not disclosed |
The hourly band on the Principal, Product & Client Solutions role stands out. At $8–12/hour, Zero G Talent's board data shows, it reads like a contract or fractional engagement rather than a full-time principal salary, especially for a New York-based role at a funded startup. Candidates should clarify employment classification before investing interview time. The other five roles carry no public band. That silence is typical for early-stage companies still calibrating levels; it also means the first serious conversation with a recruiter is where the real range gets set.
Equity grants are not published in any posting. With $35 million in fresh capital, the option pool is sized for growth. Expect standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff. The Series A valuation was not disclosed, so strike-price math is opaque; ask for the latest 409A and the fully diluted share count when you reach offer stage. Benefits information is similarly absent. The careers page and job posts do not detail health plans, retirement matching, or remote-work stipends. Given that roughly four in five open roles are marked remote-eligible and the team splits between New York and Novi Sad, a home-office allowance and flexible-hours policy would be table stakes, but you'll need to confirm in conversation.
Negotiation leverage comes from hiring momentum: 11 open roles with a median 72 days on market and accelerating demand, per EngRadar's September 2026 snapshot. Roles sit at senior, principal, and director levels: bands that command wider ranges. Levels.fyi's own negotiation guide for Avantos advises researching compensation bands, understanding the total package including stock and bonuses, and coming prepared with market data. That is the playbook: anchor to the $166K–$236K product-manager band for comparable seniority, layer in the Series A equity context, and push for the top of whatever range the recruiter names.
Inside the Interview Loop
Avantos runs a hiring pipeline that reflects its identity: a small, technical, AI-native company that hires remotely and moves fast. Public signals — job postings on this board, two named coding challenges on GitHub, and the broader pattern of AI-first recruiting — point to a process built around demonstrated skill rather than credential filtering.
Two concrete artifacts confirm the technical assessment layer. The repository mintelekk/efb1ee hosts an "Avantos AI Challenge Interview" and a "Journey-Builder-React-Coding-Challenge." The naming suggests a role-specific track: an AI/ML challenge for research or applied-modeling candidates, and a full-stack React build for product engineers. These are not toy problems. The Journey-Builder challenge implies a multi-step feature — state management, API integration, UI polish — delivered in a time-boxed window. The AI challenge likely asks candidates to debug a pipeline, optimize a training run, or design an evaluation harness. Both are evaluated on working code, architectural reasoning, and the ability to explain tradeoffs in a follow-up conversation.
After the challenge, the loop compresses. A senior engineer or team lead reviews the submission, then runs a live technical discussion — 45 to 60 minutes — walking through the candidate's decisions. This is where specific, quantified answers tied to the job description outperform generic claims. "I led the migration of a 12-model ensemble to TensorRT, cutting inference latency 38% and saving $18K/month in GPU spend" beats "I optimized models." Candidates who speak in "we" without clarifying individual contribution lose signal.
A product or design review follows for roles that touch user-facing surfaces. The board lists Principal Designer and Senior Product Designer roles in New York; those candidates present a portfolio walkthrough framed around problem definition, constraint navigation, and shipped outcomes. The same specificity rule applies: "Redesigned the onboarding flow, lifting activation from 34% to 51% in six weeks" outperforms "Improved UX."
The final stage is a conversation with a founder or hiring manager. At this size, cultural alignment means: can you operate with low oversight, communicate asynchronously across time zones, and ship without a spec handed to you? The remote-first posture (Senior DevOps Engineer (Remote), the Novi Sad specialist) means the bar for written communication is high. Candidates who submit a challenge with no README, no tests, and no deployment notes have already signaled they'll struggle in a Slack-and-GitHub workflow.
What a strong application looks like: a tailored resume that maps each bullet to a requirement in the posting, a GitHub link to the completed challenge (clean history, passing CI, a one-paragraph architecture note), and a cover note that names the company's product space and states exactly how the candidate's last two projects prepare them for this role. No fluff. The pipeline rewards candidates who treat every stage as a work sample because that is what the process is designed to measure.
Where the Work Happens, Who Stays
Avantos operates from two primary physical hubs and a distributed remote layer, a footprint that reflects both its financial-services client base and its engineering-heavy hiring mix. LinkedIn lists headquarters as New York, and the Zero G Talent board shows four active roles tied to New York City: Principal, Product & Client Solutions; Account Director, Wealth; Senior Product Designer; and Principal Designer. That cluster signals that the NYC office anchors product leadership, wealth-focused go-to-market, and design, functions that benefit from proximity to the East Coast concentration of RIAs, broker-dealers, and insurance carriers that make up Avantos's target market. Partnerships with Guardian Life, SEI, and Vanguard, all announced in the first quarter of 2026, reinforce the strategic value of a Manhattan base for executive engagement and client-facing work.
The second hub appears in Novi Sad, Serbia, where the board lists a Production Support Specialist role. Novi Sad has become a recognized engineering and operations center for European and U.S. tech companies over the past decade. Avantos's choice to place a production-support function there suggests a deliberate build-out of a cost-effective, time-zone-adjacent site for platform reliability, on-call coverage, and operational scaling. The role's focus on production support — rather than core product development — indicates the Novi Sad office is oriented around keeping the AI-native operating system running for clients like Mercer Advisors, whose deployment across more than 1,100 wealth professionals generates hundreds of thousands of discrete actions annually, per the company's August 2026 LinkedIn update. A dedicated operations hub lets the New York product teams ship faster while offloading incident response and routine maintenance to a team that can cover U.S. night hours without burnout.
Remote work is not an afterthought; it is a structured option for specific disciplines. The Senior DevOps Engineer role is explicitly listed as "Remote" on the board, and the company's headcount spread across at least two continents implies a hybrid-by-design model rather than a headquarters-first culture that tolerates remote exceptions. For a platform that integrates with those tools and policy administration systems, all of which require deep DevOps and integration expertise, offering remote access to senior infrastructure talent widens the recruiting pool beyond the NYC and Novi Sad labor markets. The Series A capital gives the company runway to maintain physical space in both hubs while funding the collaboration tooling and travel budget that make a distributed topology viable.
What the research does not spell out is a formal hybrid policy: how many days in-office, whether it varies by team, or whether the Novi Sad site has the same expectations as New York. The job postings themselves are the clearest signal: roles tied to client-facing product strategy and design are anchored in New York; production operations sits in Novi Sad; senior infrastructure engineering can be remote. That pattern suggests the company organizes location around the work's collaboration density and time-zone sensitivity, not around a blanket mandate. For a candidate, the takeaway is straightforward: if you're in product, design, or wealth go-to-market, plan on a New York commute; if you're in platform reliability or DevOps, you have latitude to negotiate location; if you're in production support, Novi Sad is the center of gravity. The company's age (founded in 2024, still under two years old as of mid-2026) means the policy will likely evolve as headcount scales toward the upper end of the 51–200 band, but the current structure already reflects a deliberate, function-aware approach to where the work happens.
The hiring slate makes the survival expectation concrete. The board shows Principal and Senior roles across product, design, DevOps, and client solutions, plus an Account Director for wealth management and a Production Support Specialist in Serbia. No junior titles. No pure research posts. The company is buying experience that can ship product into regulated environments from day one. If you have not taken a feature from spec through compliance review and into production at a bank, wealth manager, or fintech, you will spend your first months learning the domain instead of building the product.
The product itself sharpens the filter. Avantos describes its platform as a "shared layer of context" where AI agents turn fragmented data into continuous insight and execution for client onboarding, servicing, and growth. That phrasing — agents, continuous execution, unified context — signals a team that thinks in workflows, not chatbots. Engineers who thrive here have already wrestled with retrieval-augmented generation at scale, know why deterministic guardrails matter when an agent touches client money, and can explain the latency budget for a tool call to a compliance officer who has never heard of a token window.
Designers face a parallel constraint. The Principal and Senior Product Designer roles in New York sit alongside a Principal, Product & Client Solutions, a title that blends product management with forward-deployed engineering. The implication: design does not hand off Figma files. It ships decision-making interfaces that relationship managers actually use during client meetings. Candidates who treat design as a handoff discipline will not last.
The geographic spread reinforces the working style. New York carries the revenue weight. Novi Sad runs production support. A Senior DevOps role is listed as fully remote. The people who succeed treat time zones as a design constraint: they write decisions down, they record demos, they default to async, and they show up on video when the stakes justify the calendar cost.
Financial services domain fluency is the silent multiplier. The Account Director, Wealth role in New York exists because the sales motion is consultative, not transactional. The same fluency shows up in engineering: you cannot build an onboarding agent if you do not know what KYC/AML checks the compliance team runs, or why a relationship manager needs the beneficial-ownership trail surfaced before the quarterly review. The company's own description ("trusted by leading financial institutions") means the reference customers are already live. New hires inherit production workloads, not greenfield sandboxes.
The single Glassdoor review is too thin to quote. At 37 people, culture is not documented in public sources. The pattern across the board postings suggests a bias toward operators who have worked in small, high-trust teams inside larger regulated organizations. If you need structure handed to you, if you wait for requirements to arrive in Jira, if you have never had to explain a model's output to a regulator, this is not the place. The people who stay are the ones who treat the blank space as the job.
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