Quantitative Researcher | Systematic Futures/Equities | London / NYC

A senior leader at one of the firms I work with said something recently that stuck with me: "The median researcher adds zero value." He wasn’t being provocative for the sake of it, if you think about it. Most quant researchers at most firms are working on the same low-hanging fruit, on overlapping research, competing internally for the same capacity, hedged into irrelevance by a risk framework designed to protect the platform from them rather than empower them.

He went on to describe the kind of person he actually wants to hire, and it was pretty specific: Someone who finds genuine satisfaction in the work itself. Not the comp table (appreciating that no-one works for free, right!), not the brand... Quant researchers who read JVM optimisation papers because they want to understand why their backtest is slow, not just that it’s slow. Developers who dig into market microstructure literature because they want to understand what their execution code is actually doing, not just that it works. The kind of person whose curiosity bleeds across disciplines; researchers who think like engineers, engineers who think like traders, because they’ve figured out that the interesting problems live at the boundaries, not inside the silos. Someone with enough intellectual disagreeableness to challenge assumptions in a room full of people, because they care more about being right than being liked. And critically, someone who has actually delivered something, personally, not just improved or maintained what was already there.

If that sounds like something you have thought about, and perhaps at some level agree with, maybe we should chat. The project is this: a proprietary systematic shop with hubs in London and NYC, and satellite locations in Europe and US. What they trade: Futures and Equities. Short-term holding periods, at the higher end of the mid-freq spectrum (or the slower end of the high-frequency spectrum, however you prefer to think of it). Exceptional research and execution infrastructure. Significant investment in GPU infra to enhance ML/AI-driven research. Experience delivering strategies at Sharpe ~2-3+ is the qualifier.

If you’re currently running strategies at that frequency and wondering why your infrastructure costs eat half your contribution, or why 23 other teams at your firm are crowding the same positions, and think that you’d genuinely be interested in being somewhere that you could add direct value to the top-line within an environment that is demonstrably meritocratic (I have numerous examples of this playing out historically within the firm), it’d be worth getting in touch to find out more.

What they don’t want: someone optimising for their next move. Someone whose first question is "what’s the guarantee?" (we’ll chat about it, but if it’s the primary motivator, that’s probably a self-selector...). Someone who views collaboration as a vulnerability rather than an edge.

This firm isn’t entirely unique, but it’s clear on its strategy. I’m also working with a small number of firms that operate this way. London or NYC as primary hubs, fully remote optionality on the table potentially. If this sounds like the kind of environment where you’d do your best work, we should definitely chat.