Senior Quant Researcher / Quant Developer – Directional Strategies (CME Futures)

Overview

A prestigious family office seeking to expand a concentrated, high-conviction quantitative trading desk based in Dubai, led by a former Managing Director of Equity Trading from a global bank. The focus is on developing and enhancing systematic trading strategies within U.S. futures markets, predominantly CME futures. This role offers the rare chance to join a small, elite team where you manage direct capital and contribute significantly to live trading decisions without bureaucratic interference.

Role Details

The position involves creating and refining systematic, directional strategies for CME futures in timeframes ranging from minutes to hours (excluding high-frequency trading). The main goal initially is to increase alpha generation from existing directional strategies and eventually advance to managing a proprietary strategy as a Portfolio Manager.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop innovative directional trading hypotheses and enhance current systematic models within CME futures markets.
• Conduct research utilizing historical and real-time market data to identify alpha sources.
• Construct research prototypes and implement trading models in Python.
• Perform thorough backtesting including out-of-sample validation, walk-forward testing, Monte Carlo and bootstrap methods.
• Test strategy robustness across diverse parameters, data periods, and different market environments.
• Mitigate overfitting risks and common pitfalls such as look-ahead bias, data snooping, survivorship bias, and multiple testing issues.
• Incorporate real-world trading factors including commissions, slippage, liquidity constraints, turnover, and execution limitations.
• Use risk-adjusted performance metrics like Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, Calmar ratio, maximum drawdown, expectancy, profit factor, and hit rate to evaluate strategies.
• Prepare strategies for live deployment ensuring appropriate logic, parameters, constraints, risk controls, and expected behaviors are set.
• Collaborate with backend engineers to integrate trading models into the live production environment.
• Perform post-launch reviews analyzing live vs. backtest performance deviations, degradation, attribution, and root cause investigations.

Qualifications and Expertise

• Proven hands-on experience in quantitative or systematic trading with a directional research focus, preferably related to U.S. futures markets (CME experience highly desired).
• Strong foundation in statistics, probability theory, financial time series analysis, and hypothesis testing.
• Advanced proficiency in Python programming including the use of mathematical and statistical libraries for research and model development.
• Competency in constructing and critically evaluating backtests emphasizing robustness, risk factors, and feasibility of live execution.
• Practical understanding of futures contracts, expiration cycles, rollover processes, liquidity considerations, margin requirements, and trading sessions.
• Awareness of transaction costs, slippage, liquidity limitations, and execution constraints influencing real trading outcomes.
• Disciplined approach to prevent overfitting and common backtesting errors.
• Capability to independently manage research projects from conceptualization through hypothesis validation, reproducible backtesting, to live deployment recommendations.
• Keen ability to distinguish robust strategies from excessively optimized backtests.

Desirable Attributes

• Experience deploying strategies in live trading environments.
• Familiarity with proprietary or custom backtesting and research frameworks.
• Knowledge of market microstructure including order book dynamics, liquidity, bid-ask spread, and slippage effects.
• Skills in performance attribution and risk evaluation.
• Background in cryptocurrency trading on leading exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, etc.
• Applied machine learning expertise in financial time series analysis.

Team and Career Progression

The small and senior desk reports directly to an ex-Managing Director of Equity Trading from a global bank, providing considerable autonomy and ownership over research outputs. The immediate objective is to enhance returns from existing strategies, with a career trajectory geared toward Portfolio Manager responsibilities for proprietary strategies.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive pay aligned with experience and performance.
• Direct involvement with live trading and real capital allocation.
• Immediate impact on trading outcomes and profit & loss.
• Work within a lean, senior team free from bureaucratic overhead.
• Exposure to global markets and institutional-grade capital.
• Relocation support provided for the move to Dubai.