Research Engineer

Research Engineer

How Markets Should Be

Traditional financial markets are broken. We are fixing them.

QFEX is the first perpetual futures exchange to allow 24/7, high leverage trading on traditional financial assets. 

Our vision: this kind of exchange will replace the entire $100bn TradFi exchange, clearing and brokerage industry

Our mission: make QFEX that exchange.

We were founded by Cambridge Maths duo Annanay Kapila and Joshua Wharton, who previously worked at Tower Research Capital and Citadel, respectively. The team also includes former staff from Jane Street, Optiver and Jump Trading.

QFEX has raised $9.5m from a group of investors including Y Combinator, an early investor in companies like Coinbase, Reddit and Monzo.

What You’ll Do

Research
Lead research across exchange design, market microstructure, venue latency, and exchange data. Translate findings into concrete improvements to the matching engine, margin system, and fee model.

Operational Tooling
Build the internal tools that keep the exchange running: risk and margin dashboards, liquidation simulators, market surveillance, and reconciliation pipelines used by our ops team and institutional clients.

Technical direction
Evaluate tools, set coding standards, and guide architectural decisions as we scale.

Culture & hiring
Design fault-tolerant, low-latency, always-available services; write load tests and chaos suites; tune until p99 is boring.

What You’ll Need

• A STEM degree from a University that is highly ranked in your home country (at the level of Oxbridge/ Imperial in the UK, HYMPS in the US, or a top IIT in India).
• Strong Python and SQL, plus common data science libraries (pandas, numpy).
• 3+ years working closely with real-time production exchanges, perpetual futures venues, or HFT systems — whether building them, operating them, or working with them in depth.
• The desire to create and impose a responsible culture of tests, metrics, and graceful degradation.
• Impeccable levels of trust in yourself and others, including the ability to make decisions in minutes, not days.

Bonus points

• Fintech, exchange, or low-latency experience.
• Experience building operational and research tooling.
• Experience with a high-performance language like Rust, C or C++.
• Deep Kubernetes or infrastructure-as-code experience.

Benefits

• Option to sponsor your visa to work in the UK (after 1 year) New York City office, if desired.
• Lunch allowance and regular company events.
• The ability to grow alongside some of the best minds in fintech, as well as set standards and culture.
• 25 days’ holiday + bank holidays.

Interview Process

1. 2x Founder call (30 min) – learn about our vision, share your story.
2. 2x Technical (1 hour) – verbal questions and a data science task.
3. Offer – we decide fast (usually within 24 h).