Head of Quant Trading (Crypto)

A rapidly growing proprietary trading firm, founded by a small team of ambitious traders with prior collaboration with a leading multi manager, is seeking a Head of Trading to lead its crypto book. The firm has recently launched its own operation, building cutting-edge technology and proprietary systematic strategies focused on yield, delta-neutral arbitrage, and market-making. Originally an order management system provider, the firm has evolved into a full investment platform and now manages internal capital. This is an opportunity to own what you build on production-grade infrastructure with first-class execution, real ownership, flexible engagement, and the chance to work on a small, elite team.

Responsibilities

• Book Ownership: Define the investment mandate, set targets and constraints, and establish KPIs such as capacity, turnover, ROIC/Sharpe ratio, and drawdown limits.
• Alpha Development: Drive the full research-to-production cycle-design, validate, and deploy alpha strategies across market-neutral/stat-arb, basis trades, cross-venue spreads, funding opportunities, and market-making style edges.
• Portfolio Construction: Optimize position sizing, signal integration, transaction cost modeling, and manage inventory and leverage.
• Execution & Microstructure: Collaborate with the execution team to minimize slippage, manage queue dynamics and market impact, and ensure efficient routing across centralized and decentralized venues.
• Risk Management: Implement robust risk controls, including factor, venue, and latency risk mitigation; monitor regime shifts; design kill-switches; and conduct stress testing and scenario analysis.
• Capacity Scaling: Identify and resolve bottlenecks related to liquidity, borrow availability, latency, and fees; engineer solutions to scale AUM by 10×-100× while maintaining performance edge.
• Team Leadership: Mentor quantitative researchers and developers, enforce best practices in research (reproducibility, out-of-sample validation, simulation parity), and maintain a disciplined shipping cadence.
• Capital Interface: Support allocation decisions, contribute to LP communications, track record reporting, and assist with audits as required.

Requirements

• Experience: 5-10+ years in quant trading or portfolio management, or senior QR with production P&L. Strong preference for experience in crypto derivatives (perpetuals, funding, basis).
• Track Record: Demonstrated ability to scale a trading book or portfolio successfully.
• Technical Skills:
  • Coding: Strong Python (NumPy, Pandas, async I/O); experience taking research to production (profiling, reliability).
  • Microstructure: Deep understanding of order book mechanics, queue dynamics, impact modeling, and fee/latency economics across multiple venues.