Quantitative Researcher: Fixed Income

Virtu is a leading financial firm that leverages cutting edge technology to deliver liquidity to the global markets and innovative, transparent trading solutions to our clients. As a market maker, Virtu provides deep liquidity that helps to create more efficient markets around the world. Our market structure expertise, broad diversification, and execution technology enables us to provide competitive bids and offers in over 19,000 securities, at over 235 venues, in 36 countries worldwide 

The firm’s complementary core offerings—market making, client execution services, and trading venues—give Virtu a competitive advantage in developing and applying innovative tools that deliver efficiencies and performance across the organization. Investors around the world have better trading performance because of our everyday work. Our teams set the bar high and strive to provide best-in-class service to institutional investors around the world. From traders to technologists and everyone in between, we are passionate about innovating, solving problems and making an impact to the bottom line.

THE ROLE

Virtu is looking for an experienced, detail-oriented Quantitative Researcher to join our Financial Engineering team in Boston, supporting our Virtu Execution Services Business. The emphasis of this position is on the research, development, deployment and support of our industry-leading statistical models for pre and post-trade decision support for fixed income securities and making them available for trading applications. The successful candidate joins a strong team that conducts trading related research and development by applying principles of scientific computing, statistical learning as well as analytical and programming skills. We create actionable products that improve decision-making for equity, fixed income, FX, and other asset classes across a diverse client base. 

• Learn and be knowledgeable about our fixed income data, analytics and models, lead new improvements and/or initiatives, and handle their support
• Develop re-usable common framework components and contribute to interfaces that expose features of our analytics/model to internal and external clients
• Apply advanced data processing and statistical learning techniques to enhance expert knowledge in measuring and analyzing realized transactions costs of Virtu’s peer clients
• Conduct critical comparison of alternative data sources and, if necessary, integrate them in the production pipeline
• Effectively document use cases, requirements and architectural specifications related to the models and applications
• Work with product managers, FI trading desk and client services teams to understand, prioritize and effectively execute requirements

THE CANDIDATE 

• PhD or Master’s degree in a quantitative field
• 4+ years of work experience in finance
• Institutional knowledge of fixed income markets with emphasis on trading-related aspects
• Ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with multi-office/region teams as well as work independently, and adapt to changes
• Strong python programming skills, including experience with scalable software design and development (not just scripting), experience with relational databases is a must
• Previous experience with statistical, machine learning and optimization techniques
• Hands-on experience with intraday financial data and analytics
• Ability to effectively use the Linux platform for development and data processing
• Familiarity with KDB/q and/or knowledge of C++ is a plus

THE PROCESS