Senior Quantitative Researcher - Options / Derivatives

Significant, multi-billion-dollar NYC hedge fund is expanding its quantitative options research effort and is looking for a senior researcher who can bring new trading ideas from research through live implementation.

The particular interest is in options strategies operating over shorter time horizons , including automated and higher-frequency approaches. The mandate is intentionally broad: volatility, relative value, market microstructure, short-term forecasting, execution, and other opportunities that can be systematically captured in options markets.

This is not a narrowly defined research seat. The right person will have considerable freedom to identify where the opportunities are, develop the research, test it against real market behavior, and work directly with traders and engineers to put successful ideas into production.

The work may include:

• Developing alpha and relative-value strategies across equity and index options.
• Modeling volatility, skew, term structure and relationships across options, underlying securities and related instruments.
• Finding predictive information in trades, quotes, order flow, liquidity and other high-frequency market data.
• Researching shorter-term market behavior and opportunities created by temporary pricing or liquidity dislocations.
• Improving how strategies interact with the market, including execution, transaction costs and market impact.
• Taking research from hypothesis through testing, implementation and evaluation of live performance.

We're particularly interested in researchers who bring:

• Significant quantitative research or trading experience in options/derivatives .
• A strong understanding of volatility and options pricing and risk.
• Experience developing strategies that have actually traded, rather than research limited to theoretical modeling.
• Strong statistical and computational research skills.
• Experience working with large market datasets and Python-based research environments.
• Exposure to automated, short-horizon or higher-frequency trading is particularly valuable.
• An advanced quantitative degree is preferred but less important than the quality and relevance of the research experience.

The fund is deliberately non-pod and highly collaborative . Researchers work across traditional strategy boundaries and interact closely with PMs, traders and technology rather than operating within isolated books.

For someone coming from a strong options market-making, electronic trading or quantitative derivatives environment, this offers an opportunity to apply that expertise within a broader hedge-fund mandate—with substantial research ownership and room to build.