Quantitative Researcher (Crypto Perpetuals)

Location: New York, United States; on-site

Base salary: $250,000–$350,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.

Company

Polymarket operates a peer-to-peer prediction market platform covering politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs.

What you will do

• Design and maintain multi-venue spot price aggregation, including source weighting, outlier removal, and staleness handling.
• Build and calibrate perpetual futures funding rate formulas, including premium calculations, interest components, clamping logic, and settlement cadence.
• Analyze new asset listings and determine initial margin, maintenance margin, leverage tiers, and maximum open interest using volatility and liquidity data.
• Write rigorous specifications for pricing methodologies and edge cases that can be implemented directly in production.
• Implement your own research in production and monitor continuously running pricing and risk systems.
• Investigate live mark price anomalies and source divergences, iterating on models when failure modes appear in real markets.

Requirements

• Quantitative experience at a perpetuals exchange or high-frequency trading firm, with hands-on ownership of production mark price, funding rate, or margin models.
• Deep understanding of perpetual exchange mechanics, including funding formulas, index aggregation, margin tiers, and behavior under adversarial or illiquid conditions.
• Strong market microstructure intuition, including liquidity, staleness, venue disagreement, and multi-source price signals.
• Ability to write rigorous specifications and implement research independently in production-quality code.
• Strong Python programming skills beyond research notebooks.
• Ability to account for violent market moves, data outages, source conflicts, and other edge cases.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-source price aggregation or oracle systems.
• Execution or market-making experience at a trading firm.
• Familiarity with on-chain data sources and decentralized price feeds.

Culture & Benefits

• High-ownership role with direct responsibility from research and specification through production implementation and monitoring.
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Full health, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) match and hardware setup including a new MacBook Pro, display, and accessories.