Quantitative Researcher – Futures & ETF Market Making

Overview

K-Hawk Capital is a systematic trading firm focused on high-turnover intraday strategies in equities, ETFs, and futures. Our performance depends on sophisticated quantitative models, disciplined transaction-cost control, deep market microstructure insight, and tight integration with live trading systems.

We are hiring an experienced Quantitative Researcher specializing in Futures and ETF Market Making to research, develop, and continuously improve our market-making strategies, with a focus on optimal control, inventory management, market microstructure alpha, and execution optimization.

Key Responsibilities

- Design, implement, and optimize systematic market-making strategies across liquid futures and ETFs.
- Develop optimal control frameworks for agile quoting, inventory management, position sizing, and risk management.
- Research and implement short-horizon market microstructure alpha signals using order flow, order-book imbalance, trade activity, and liquidity dynamics.
- Build and calibrate models for fill probability, queue position, adverse selection, and short-term price movements.
- Develop inventory-aware quoting strategies that dynamically adjust bid/ask prices, spreads, and order sizes based on market conditions.
- Research stochastic control, dynamic programming, and reinforcement learning approaches to market making.
- Model limit order book dynamics, including order arrivals, cancellations, queue depletion, and liquidity regimes.
- Develop and optimize execution algorithms to maximize spread capture while minimizing adverse selection, market impact, and transaction costs.
- Research cross-asset relationships between equity index futures and ETFs to improve pricing, hedging, and market-making decisions.
- Build and evaluate realistic backtesting and simulation frameworks incorporating queue priority, latency, partial fills,



and exchange matching rules.
- Analyze historical and live trading data to identify performance leakage, improve execution quality, and increase strategy capacity.
- Monitor production trading strategies and continuously refine quoting, inventory management, and execution logic.

Required Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in quantitative research, electronic market making, or systematic trading.
- Hands-on experience developing or optimizing market-making strategies in futures and/or ETFs.
- Strong understanding of optimal control, stochastic processes, inventory management, and quantitative optimization.
- Deep knowledge of market microstructure, limit order books, order flow dynamics, and adverse selection.
- Proven experience developing short-horizon predictive signals and market microstructure alpha.
- Experience with transaction cost modeling, fill probability estimation, and execution optimization.
- Proficiency in Python and experience working with high-frequency market data.
- Experience using Claude AI or similar AI coding assistants to accelerate research, prototyping, development, testing, and documentation.
- Excellent analytical, quantitative, and problem-solving skills.
- Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in a STEM field (Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, or related discipline).

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience market making CME equity index futures (ES, NQ, RTY) and liquid ETFs (SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA).
- Experience applying reinforcement learning, stochastic optimal control, or dynamic programming to market-making problems.
- Experience with L2/L3 market data, market-by-order feeds, and queue-aware execution simulations.
- Familiarity with low-latency trading systems and exchange connectivity.
- Strong C++ programming skills.
- - Demonstrated success improving market-making profitability, Sharpe ratios, execution quality, or strategy capacity.

📌 Quantitative Researcher (India)
🏢 K-Hawk Capital
📍 India