Quantitative Researcher / Systematic Trader (First Hire)

Stabile Search • Greenwich, CT

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

This is a unique opportunity for a Quantitative Researcher or Systematic Trader from a top-tier firm to take ownership of an entire trading problem, from idea generation to execution and P&L. The client, a proprietary trading firm with decades of experience in futures markets, is making its first quantitative hire to build a new programmatic trading business within an established discretionary commodities pod. This role is described as a co-founder position for the new effort, offering end-to-end responsibility for strategy development, research, system building, production deployment, and live monitoring. The research universe is broad, focusing on repeatable behaviors driven by market structure, rather than pure alpha-seeking. The initial focus will be on futures, with potential expansion to equities. The role is designed to be bootstrapped, starting with a few profitable systems and scaling from there. The position reports to the pod head and the firm's founder, with the potential to grow into a CTO-like leadership role. Compensation includes a base salary and a significant profit-sharing component, emphasizing long-term alignment.

Requirements

• Approximately 2 to 6 years of experience at a leading quantitative trading, market-making, or systematic investment firm (e.g., Jane Street, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading caliber).
• Exceptional Python skills, capable of writing both research-quality and production-quality code.
• Strong command of modern quantitative development workflows: SQL, Git, Linux, APIs, and large financial datasets.
• Strong quantitative foundation in statistics, probability, time-series analysis, and empirical research.
• Demonstrated ability to design and evaluate systematic strategies on historical market data, with a deep understanding of backtest limitations.
• Serious data-engineering ability: acquiring, cleaning, validating, joining, and maintaining large and messy financial datasets.
• Understanding of market microstructure, order books, auctions, execution, liquidity, and how institutional flows move prices.
• Commercial judgment: ability to assess why an edge should exist, identify counterparties, understand arbitrage potential, and determine monetizability.
• Ability to translate ambiguous trading ideas from experienced traders into rigorous research processes without a written specification.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with futures, derivatives, spreads, curves, or other relative-value structures.
• Experience with real-time market data, exchange and broker APIs, and automated execution in production.

Responsibilities

• Full strategy lifecycle: idea generation, hypothesis formation, data acquisition, research, backtesting, system development, execution logic, deployment, and live monitoring.
• Continuous, independent idea generation, and translating observations from experienced traders into rigorous, testable hypotheses.
• Sourcing, cleaning, validating, and maintaining market and alternative data.
• Conducting backtests that account for biases, transaction costs, slippage, market impact, capacity, and realistic execution.
• Developing reusable research and production infrastructure.
• Developing signal logic, portfolio construction, risk controls, order generation, execution, and monitoring for live strategies.
• Focusing on repeatable behavior driven by structural, mechanical, benchmark, hedging, liquidity, or timing reasons.
• Operating a diversified portfolio of independent systems with holding periods ranging from seconds to weeks.
• Potentially expanding to equities after establishing profitable futures systems.
• Recruiting and shaping the research process as the systematic business grows.

Benefits

• $200,000 to $250,000 base salary
• 10% of the profits on the books built by the hire
• Potential for increased profit participation (approx. 5%) as the effort scales and additional researchers are hired
• Opportunity to build a systematic trading business from the ground up with proprietary capital
• Direct access to experienced traders and decision-makers
• No bureaucracy or approval layers for testing good ideas
• Long-term alignment through meaningful participation in the value created by the business
• Potential to grow into a CTO-type leadership seat

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed