Quantitative Research Associate Job Description Template

The quantitative research associate supports the research team with data work, backtesting and analysis, and is the standard entry route into systematic investing. A large share of the role is getting data into a state where research is possible, which is unglamorous and completely determines whether the conclusions are trustworthy. The associates who progress are the ones who start proposing hypotheses rather than only testing other people’s.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Prepare, clean and validate data sets used in research
• Run backtests and produce performance and risk statistics
• Implement and test research ideas specified by senior researchers
• Investigate data quality issues and document their impact
• Build reusable research tooling and analysis notebooks
• Produce charts and summaries for research reviews
• Reproduce published methods and assess whether they hold on the firm’s data
• Maintain the research data catalogue and its documentation
• Support live strategy monitoring and performance attribution
• Contribute original research hypotheses to the team

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a quantitative discipline such as mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering or computer science

Required Skills and Experience

• 1+ years of quantitative or data analysis experience, internships included
• Strong applied statistics and probability
• Proficiency with Python, pandas and SQL
• Careful, systematic approach to data quality
• Understanding of the basics of backtesting and its pitfalls
• Ability to document and explain analytical work clearly
• Genuine interest in financial markets
• Comfort working with large data sets

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to market microstructure or trading data
• Experience with a distributed compute framework