Software Engineer, Data: Early Career (2024)

Aquatic is a quantitative trading and investment company recently launched by Jon Graham. Prior to founding Aquatic, Jon was a Partner and Senior Managing Director at Citadel, where he worked for more than 13 years. At Citadel, Jon held numerous senior positions over the years, including head of Statistical Arbitrage and Equity High Frequency, culminating in leading the highly successful Global Quantitative Strategies business.

Uncluttered by legacy platforms and processes, Aquatic develops systematic investment strategies, enabled by a leading-edge research and development platform. The vision is simple: to build a world class, quantitative trading company with a collaborative team of highly capable researchers and engineers.

At Aquatic, we are actively recruiting for a data-focused Software Engineer in our Chicago or New York office. In this role, you will collaborate with some of the best and most experienced researchers and technologists in the financial services industry to build systems that are critical to the success of our company.

Aquatic is a place where individual contributions have significant impact. Your day-to-day will be focused on building systems that directly contribute to the profitability of the firm. As your skills and experience grow, you'll have opportunities to dive deeper into the research technologies at the core of Aquatic's business.

Responsibilities:

Work 1-on-1 with senior engineers who will mentor and guide you
Apply hands-on software development using Java and/or Python, SQL

Design, build, and maintain both cloud-based and on-prem data pipelines used in both research and production trading environments
Work with signals researchers to integrate non-market data sets into our prediction model
Solve problems of both latency and scale and make intelligent tradeoffs between them

Design and build "Big Data" systems, using technologies like Amazon S3 and Google Big Query
Learn software design and testing techniques, such as Refactoring and Test Driven Development
Required Experience:

A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent
A history of building software solutions in Python or Java. Stronger candidates will have knowledge of:
Event-driven architectures
Streaming data pipelines
Cloud services (AWS + GCP)
Distributed systems
Strong quantitative skills preferred
No more than 3 years of professional (post-education) experience
Desired Qualities:

Eager to learn through direct mentoring
Prefers working in a team towards common objectives
Comfortable providing and receiving actionable feedback
Strong bias for action
Enthusiasm for detail
Motivated by an ambitious environment and driven colleagues
The base salary for this role is anticipated to be between $150,000 and $200,000, which is based on information at the time of posting. This position may also be eligible for additional forms of compensation, such as a discretionary bonus, and benefits. Discretionary bonus can be a significant portion of total compensation. Actual compensation for successful candidates will be carefully determined based on a number of factors, including their unique skills, qualifications and relevant experience.

Benefits:

Benefits: Fully paid medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents, competitive 401k plan, employer-paid life & disability insurance
Perks: Wellness programs, casual dress, snacks, lunch, game room, team and company events
Development: Open environment to maximize learning and knowledge sharing
Time: Generous PTO, paid holidays, competitive paid caregiver leaves

Aquatic Capital

This role represents a unique opportunity to join a quantitative investment manager at the foundational level of building a world class operation from scratch. The firm's culture will be shaped by collaboration, meritocracy, ambition, and calm determination.

Aquatic is a proud equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.