We are seeking a highly skilled and entrepreneurial Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale the core trading and research infrastructure for a newly formed quantamental trading pod. You will lead the design and deployment of systems that support semi-systematic strategies operating in Japanese equity market.
This is a hands-on role at the intersection of technology, research, and trading - you'll collaborate directly with quantitative researchers, fundamental analysts and the Senior Portfolio Manager to turn ideas into production-ready strategies.
The pod is led by a Senior Portfolio Manager with 10+ years of experience and a proven track record in alpha generation, strategy development, and risk management at top-tier firms. This is a unique opportunity to own the technology stack from day one, influence strategic direction, and help shape a high-performance team in a collaborative and intellectually rigorous environment.
Principal Responsibilities
- Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Design and maintain the trading system architecture, including components for data ingestion, signal generation, backtesting, execution, and risk management
- Make decisions on technology stack, performance optimization, and scalability
- Ensure the system supports reasonable latency, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant processing
- Team & Collaboration
- Work closely with the Senior Portfolio Manager and fundamental analysts to understand strategy requirements and translate them into code
- Strategy Implementation Support
- Build and maintain research infrastructure (e.g., backtesting frameworks, simulation environments, feature stores)
- Translate researchers' prototypes (e.g., in Python) into production grade code.
- Execution & Infrastructure
- Optimize and support order execution systems
- Implement real-time risk checks, monitoring, logging, and alerting tools
- Data Engineering & Management
- Oversee the pipeline for ingesting, cleaning, and storing data (market, alternative, internal)
- Ensure data integrity and access for trading and research
- DevOps & Reliability
- Often take responsibility for deployment pipelines, version control, and production support
- Ensure high system availability and rapid recovery in case of failures
- Security & Compliance
- Make sure that the pod's infrastructure adheres to firm-wide compliance and security standards
- Ensure rigorous version control, code quality, and documentation standards
- Conduct thorough testing and debugging of software components, resolving any issues or discrepancies
- AI/Machine Learning capability
- Incorporate AI/ Machine Learning technologies into the team's research and investment process wherever possible
Required Technical Skills
- 1st class Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field
- Proficiency in Python, especially for scripting, research integration, and data tools
- Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, and multithreaded/concurrent programming
- Strong knowledge of SQL and modern database design (e.g., column stores, time-series DBs)
- Familiarity with software engineering best practices: version control (Git), unit testing, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, etc.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed systems
Required Experience
- 3+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining high-performance trading systems, ideally in a systematic equities or quant trading environment
- Proven experience in:
- Handling large-scale market data (e.g., normalization, feed handling, replay systems)
- Building event-driven architectures
- Identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks, data inconsistencies, or system instability in production environments
Highly Valued Relevant Attributes
- Excellent communication skills - able to interface directly with quant researchers, fundamental analysts and traders, translate requirements, and explain technical decisions
- Demonstrated initiative and ownership: able to drive projects independently, while collaborating effectively in a team setting
- Comfortable in fast-paced, iterative environments where priorities can shift quickly based on market conditions or research insights
- Detail oriented, organized, demonstrating thoroughness and strong ownership of work
- Prior knowledge of Japanese market is a plus.
