Augmentti Hiring! Full Time Quant Researcher - Options MM in - Ricebowl

Been talking to a team I work with at a prop firm recently, and something that came from the conversation was the differences between their setup and some of the more typical/traditional Options MM shops.

In the obvious places (borrowing from the trend on r/quant here for not doxxing oneself - think IMC/SIG/Optiver/Akuna etc.), there's a trader sat between you and the market. Your research goes in, someone else makes the trading calls, and the P&L is a team number you had a hand in somewhere. However solid your work is, you never quite get to own the outcome, or prove what you were actually worth.

The firm I'm working with on this is built the other way round. Fully systematic, no discretionary trader in the middle. The researchers own the strategy end to end, build it, and take it all the way into production themselves. What you make is yours, and it's measurable.

If that sounds like the kind of setup you’d want to work in, and the kind of ownership over the end-to-end strategy, maybe we should chat.

The Firm: a systematic trading firm, building out its options market making in Singapore & NYC.

The setup: Research across thousands of cores. ML research that runs horizontally across the whole firm. Small, lean team (< 20) that's still being built, so the per-person impact, and the upside, sits on a different scale to being one of a thousand on a big floor, with massive opportunity for ownership and autonomy, and genuinely still early-stage enough for someone joining now to be part of defining the long-term strategy of the group.

The qualifier: strong CS fundamentals and real production code, C++ for the day job, Python for the research. A systematic background where you've built and owned, not handed research over for someone else to run. A solid grasp of options (but not necessarily an options specialist). You don’t need to be a 10-year Options MM veteran, 2-to-5 years is very much in scope. Happily chat to anyone on the D1 side, or systematic with broad options knowledge rather than a pure OMM specialist, the research and engineering expertise matter more than the exact focus of your role now.

What they don't want: pure latency specialists where the outcome is entirely predicated on speed. Classical alpha researchers whose whole edge is feature construction (it tends not to translate, worth being upfront). Narrow specialists with no execution exposure. People who want slow, foundational, deep research, that isn't what this team does.

The transparent bit: the bar is exceptionally high, and it’s a small team punching WELL above its weight against teams orders of magnitude larger at other firms, so expectation on individual contribution is also fairly high. What you get back is genuine autonomy, exceptional people around you, and a level of ownership that's rare anywhere.

It's mid-year, and if you're sat on a long NC the timing might not feel perfect, but I play a long game. If any of this gives you pause for thought, and you’d be interested to find out more, even with the future in mind, drop me a line.

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