Quantitative Researcher / Systematic Trader (First Hire)

Are you a Systematic Trader or Quantitative Researcher at a top-tier quant firm who wants to own the entire trading problem — idea, research, engineering, execution, and live P&L — instead of one narrow slice of it?

My client is a self-funded proprietary trading firm with roughly four decades in the futures markets, and they are making their first quantitative hire: the architect of a new programmatic trading business inside one of their most established trading pods.

This is a role I am exclusively recruiting for. If you have a few years of training at a leading quantitative trading or market-making firm and you are ready to build something from zero with proprietary capital behind you, then this is the role for you.

What's the Job?

You will be the first systematic hire inside a discretionary commodities pod, brought in to build a programmatic trading effort from the ground up. The pod head describes it as a cofounder role for the effort, and it is genuinely end-to-end: you generate the ideas, do the research, build the systems that trade them, push them into production, and watch the P&L.

What you will own:

• The full strategy lifecycle: idea generation, hypothesis formation, data acquisition, research, backtesting, system development, execution logic, deployment, and live monitoring.

• Continuous, independent idea generation — plus translating observations from traders with decades of screen time into rigorous, testable hypotheses. You will drive the pipeline, not work a research queue.

• Sourcing, cleaning, validating, and maintaining the market and alternative data behind those hypotheses.

• Backtests that honestly account for look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, overfitting, transaction costs, slippage, market impact, capacity, and realistic execution.

• Reusable research and production infrastructure, so each subsequent idea gets tested faster than the last.

• Signal logic, portfolio construction, risk controls, order generation, execution, and monitoring for anything that survives research.

The research universe is deliberately broad, with an emphasis on repeatable behavior driven by structural, mechanical, benchmark, hedging, liquidity, or timing reasons rather than alpha-seeking: time-of-day, day-of-week, seasonal, expiration and roll patterns; opening and closing auctions, imbalances, and forced flow; index rebalances and benchmark flows; futures rolls and settlements; ETF creation/redemption and cross-instrument dislocations; options expiration and dealer hedging; and commodity-specific structure across energy, metals, grains, softs, and livestock. Holding periods can run from seconds to weeks, with the goal of operating a diversified portfolio of independent systems.

Futures are the starting point, since that is where the firm's edge lives, but they are open to equities. The path is deliberately bootstrapped: get two or three profitable systems live, then scale outward, hire, and build. You would report to the pod head and to the firm's founder, who has been building quantitative systems with the same programmer for 25 years and intends to mentor this person directly. For the right person, this grows into a CTO-type leadership seat with responsibility for recruiting and shaping the research process across a broader systematic business.

Compensation

A $200,000 to $250,000 base salary, plus 10% of the profits on the books you build. As the effort scales and additional researchers come on, that expands to roughly 5% participation in the profits of the other books.

The pods here are fully independent — no cross-pod netting, and the firm pays out on stated terms. The intent is long-term alignment: someone who helps build a systematic trading business should participate meaningfully in the value that business creates, not simply collect a salary and a discretionary bonus.

Qualifications

• Approximately 2 to 6 years at a leading quantitative trading, market-making, or systematic investment firm. Experience at a Jane Street, Jump Trading, or Hudson River Trading caliber organization is particularly relevant, though the training and raw ability matter more than the logo.

• Exceptional Python, with the ability to write both research-quality and production-quality code.

• Strong command of modern quantitative development workflows: SQL, Git, Linux, APIs, and large financial datasets.

• A 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 where backtests lie to you.

• 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.

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

• Commercial judgment: the instinct to ask why an edge should exist, who is on the other side of it, why it has not been arbitraged away, and whether it can actually be monetized.

• The ability to take an ambiguous trading idea from an experienced trader and turn it into a rigorous research process without a written spec.

The person who thrives here is early in career, ambitious, intellectually curious, and entrepreneurial — someone who may be doing well inside a large quantitative organization but wants the whole problem instead of a piece of it.

Location

Greenwich, Connecticut is preferred, sitting directly with the pod head. The firm is also opening new New York City space on November 1, and for a compelling candidate they would consider a hybrid split — two or three days in Greenwich and the balance in the city.

Who are They?

A self-funded proprietary trading firm, roughly 40 years old, running entirely on partner capital with no outside investors. The firm started as a NYMEX floor operation with around 250 traders at its peak, alongside what was once one of the largest commodity clearing businesses in the market. Today it runs roughly 40 traders organized as independent pods — the pod head describes the structure as a smaller version of a multi-strategy platform.

The pod you would join has been running for 14 years and now includes about 10 traders, all discretionary, trading multi-commodity momentum and order flow across energies, grains, softs, and metals, plus short-term weather trading with a heavy natural gas book in winter.

The pitch for leaving a large quant firm is straightforward. There is no bureaucracy and no approval layer — a good idea gets tested now, not next quarter. You get direct access to traders and decision-makers who have spent decades monetizing market structure and participant behavior, and to proprietary capital that does not come with fundraising or investor-relations constraints. And because the firm is self-funded, scale is not a gate: a strategy earning $250,000 to $2 million a year is absolutely worth doing here, and fifteen of those add up to a real business. Those are precisely the capacity-constrained opportunities the largest firms rationally ignore.

To learn more, apply here today or email me at: [email protected].