Quantitative Development Internship, Summer 2022/23

Job Description

What you’ll do as a Quant Development Intern:

Our Quantitative Team are a mixture of mathematicians, statisticians and technologists that find solutions to problems. We create trading models and strategies scientifically by combining our quantitative expertise with an understanding of derivatives and financial markets. We are seeking Juniors to join the team to apply their quantitative skills to exciting problem. You don't need a background in finance or trading, instead we look for maths and coding skills.

Our Quantitative Developers are part of the Quant Trading & Research team at Akuna. Our Quant Devs have strong programming skills, familiarity with mathematical techniques and the fluency to leverage both skills to produce trading solutions and high-performance production code. Our Quant Developers:

• Design and develop production code of trading strategies: pricing models, execution logic and performance optimization along with researchers, traders and system engineers
• Analyse and incorporate market signals in our trading systems
• Advance existing codebase and propose new solutions and improvements

This internship will include a mixture of Akunacademy training sessions, project work, and mentoring opportunities. If this sounds interesting to you, apply now! We are looking for people who have innovative ideas, think analytically, and have an entrepreneurial mindset and want to make an immediate impact in our growing company and contribute to Akuna’s strategy portfolio.

Internship dates: 10 weeks from November 2022- February 2023

This is a paid internship with an annual salary of $100K AUD pro rata for the summer. We, further, provide travel and housing for anyone not living in Sydney.

Requirements for this role:

• Australian or NZ citizen or Australian Permanent residences only
• University Degree graduating between August 2023 and January 2024
• Strong programming skills in Python or C++
• Experience in object-oriented programming
• Experience with generic and/or parallel programming
• A basic understanding of probability, statistics, calculus and linear algebra
• Deeper understanding of any of the following fields: Linear Algebra, Numerical Methods, Statistics, Optimization, Signal Processing, Computer Architecture, Machine Learning
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to run a project in a fast paced, team environment

Qualities that make great candidates:

• Bachelor, Honours, Masters or PhDs in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, or related degrees
• Distinction Average & proven strong academics
• Awards, prizes, medals, competitions, & scholarships
• Experience in research within an academic or professional environment

About Akuna:

Akuna Capital is an innovative trading firm with a strong focus on collaboration, cutting-edge technology, data driven solutions and automation. We specialise in providing liquidity as an options market maker – meaning we are committed to providing competitive quotes that we are willing to both buy and sell. To do this successfully we design and implement our own low latency technologies, trading strategies and mathematical models. At Akuna we have a flat structure, where the best idea wins.

Our Founding Partners, including our CEO Andrew Killion, first conceptualised Akuna in their hometown of Sydney. They opened our first office in 2011 in Chicago, the heart of the derivatives & options industry. Akuna then expanded to Sydney in 2018 to be the centre of our Asian trading operations, and in 2021 we moved to our Barangaroo waterfront office. We currently trade in HK, Korea, India, cryptocurrencies, and US night markets and are excited for expansions into all the major Asian exchanges. We also have offices in London, Shanghai and Boston.

At Akuna, we believe that the people are the centre of everything we do. Our Sydney office has a start-up feel with less than 200 people, which means you really get to know the team! We run social poker competitions, happy hours, have a fully stacked breakfast and snack room, host social events, go on company trips, social club events, and offer great training with our Akuna University. We are expanding rapidly and looking for the best talent to join us on this journey. If you enjoy being part of smart, driven teams with real challenges to solve- this could be the place for you!