Quantitative Trader

The problem.

Almost everything runs without you. That is the point. The failure modes that matter are the ones the system does not recognise as failures: a venue that is degraded but answering; a market that quotes but does not trade; a model whose inputs still arrive and no longer mean anything. You are the person who notices.

What you would do.

• Hold the live book well enough to know when a normal-looking day is not one.
• Set and defend the limits that stop the system before it needs stopping. Argue for the ones you think are wrong.
• Take the system down when the evidence says to. Write the note afterwards on what you saw and what should be automatic next time.
• Turn every manual intervention into a rule the system applies itself, so the same judgement does not depend on you being awake.
• Work with research on what live behaviour says about the assumptions. The market is the only out-of-sample data there is.

What we would want evidence of.

• You have traded something systematic and can describe a day you overrode it, and whether you were right.
• You think in distributions rather than outcomes. It shows when you describe a decision that went badly.
• You can hold a probabilistic view and express it precisely enough to be coded.
• You know what your intervention cost, including times it cost nothing and you were still wrong to make it.
• You escalate early and without drama.

What would make this a bad fit.

This role is a poor fit if you want discretion over what is traded. The discretion here is whether to keep running, not what to buy.

This role is a poor fit if you need the adrenaline of a manual desk. Most days here are quiet. The quiet is the product.