MFT TradFi Research Lead (AI)

Location: Hybrid work format in Amsterdam, Netherlands; full relocation support is provided.

Company

Technology-first hedge fund building trading infrastructure, AI research pipelines, and performance-critical systems for crypto and traditional financial markets.

What you will do

• Lead systematic mid-frequency strategy research from alpha generation and validation through predictive signals, portfolio construction, and execution logic.
• Analyze live performance and improve capacity, turnover, transaction costs, drawdowns, and risk-adjusted returns using market and alternative datasets.
• Build portfolio optimization, capital allocation, risk modeling, and exposure-control frameworks.
• Improve execution quality through transaction cost analysis, slippage and market impact modeling, and production monitoring.
• Define requirements for data pipelines, simulation frameworks, and realistic backtesting infrastructure in partnership with engineers.
• Mentor researchers, participate in hiring, establish research standards, and shape the long-term research and technology roadmap.

Requirements

• Quantitative research experience in systematic trading with a track record of taking profitable mid-frequency strategies from concept to production.
• Experience with traditional financial markets, including equities, futures, options, or FX.
• Strong understanding of market microstructure, statistical modeling, time-series analysis, portfolio optimization, execution algorithms, and transaction cost modeling.
• Excellent Python programming skills and experience working with large market datasets.
• Mathematical background in probability, statistics, and optimization.
• Experience mentoring researchers or leading research projects.

Nice to have

• C++ engineering experience and machine learning applied to alpha generation.
• Alternative data research or reinforcement learning experience.
• GPU computing experience.
• Experience building research platforms or backtesting infrastructure.
• Experience managing production systematic portfolios.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the intersection of trading, AI, and frontier technologies.
• Build trading and research systems from scratch with direct influence on research methodology and production systems.
• Access to an in-house AI research lab and modern experimental hardware.
• Stable long-term funding and collaboration with engineers on production infrastructure.
• Hybrid work in Amsterdam with full relocation support.