Most quant hiring problems start with the job title. A firm writes "quant" when it means one of three quite different jobs, and candidates do the same on their CVs. The result is a shortlist of strong people who are wrong for the seat.
This is how we separate the three roles when we write a spec with a client.
Quant researcher
A quant researcher finds and tests trading ideas. The work is closer to applied science than to software engineering: forming a hypothesis about a market, getting the data, testing whether the effect is real, and deciding whether it survives costs and capacity.
A typical week involves data cleaning, statistical tests, backtests, reading papers and writing up results for the team. The best researchers are sceptical of their own findings. They know what overfitting looks like and they design tests that can prove them wrong.
What firms test for: probability and statistics, a programming language for research (usually Python), the ability to explain a past research project in depth, and judgement about whether a result is worth trading.
Typical background: a PhD or strong master's in mathematics, physics, statistics, computer science or another quantitative field, although plenty of good researchers came in straight from a bachelor's degree.
Quant developer
A quant developer builds the software that research and trading run on. Depending on the firm that means pricing libraries, backtesting frameworks, research data pipelines, or the production trading system itself.
The work is engineering first. A quant developer writes code that other people depend on every day, so reliability, performance and clean design matter more than a clever model. At firms that trade at high speed, the line between quant developer and low-latency engineer gets thin.
What firms test for: strong C++ or Python (often both), data structures and algorithms, system design, and enough understanding of the trading or research problem to make sensible trade-offs.
Typical background: computer science or a related degree, often with experience at a trading firm, a bank's electronic trading team or a performance-critical tech company.
Quant trader
A quant trader runs strategies in the market and is responsible for their results. At a market maker that means managing positions, adjusting parameters as conditions change and working with researchers and developers to improve the strategy.
The role needs quick, numerate decision making under pressure, but also the discipline to follow a process. Many firms hire traders as graduates and train them in house, so raw ability often matters more than experience at junior level.
What firms test for: mental arithmetic, probability, game theory and estimation questions, often under time pressure, plus a feel for risk and how the candidate reasons when they are wrong.
Typical background: varied. Mathematics, econometrics, engineering and physics are common, and firms in Amsterdam regularly hire traders straight from university.
Where the roles overlap
The titles blur at many firms. A researcher may own a strategy end to end and effectively trade it. A developer may spend half the week on research tooling. Smaller firms often want one person who covers two of the three.
That is fine, as long as the spec says so. The questions we ask at intake:
- Will this person spend most of their time finding ideas, building software or running strategies?
- What does success look like after six months: a new signal, a faster system or a better result on the book?
- Who will they work with every day, and what does that person already cover?
If the answers point to two roles, it is usually better to hire for the one that matters most and give the person room to grow into the other, than to look for someone who is excellent at both.
For candidates
If you are not sure which role suits you, look at what you enjoy when nobody is asking you to do it. People who keep testing ideas tend to be researchers. People who keep improving their tools tend to be developers. People who want the result to be theirs, today, tend to be traders.
Hiring for one of these roles, or thinking about a move? Get in touch, or read how we work as a quant recruitment agency.
