Overview
Quant Desk Lead and Portfolio Manager at EMCD — Dubai, United Arab Emirates. We are looking for a Quant Desk Lead and Portfolio Manager to lead the systematic quant desk across both funds. This is not a pure research role, the person will own the book, the research platform, execution, risk monitoring, and P&L. Systematic quantitative is the largest allocation across our funds. We need someone who can bring live strategies, validate them properly, and move from research to production in weeks, not quarters.
Full job description
We are looking for a Quant Desk Lead and Portfolio Manager to lead the systematic quant desk across both funds. This is not a pure research role, the person will own the book, the research platform, execution, risk monitoring, and P&L.
Systematic quantitative is the largest allocation across our funds. We need someone who can bring live strategies, validate them properly, and move from research to production in weeks, not quarters.
Responsibilities
- Lead the quant desk and run its book across both funds
- Own P&L, position sizing, execution, hedging, leverage, and exposure within the risk policy
- Research, build, test, and deploy systematic strategies into live trading
- Own the research platform end to end: data ingestion, backtesting, execution, and live risk monitoring
- Set the standard for realistic backtesting, including fees, funding, slippage, fills, turnover, and capacity
- Decide what brings the existing statistical arbitrage sleeve live or what should replace it
- Report weekly on performance, risk, and attribution to the CIO and Risk Manager
Requirements
- Live track record running market-neutral, long-short, statistical arbitrage, funding arbitrage, or cross-exchange arbitrage strategies with real capital
- Experience with systematic / code-based trading, not only discretionary or long-only strategies
- Verifiable performance net of realistic trading costs
- Strong understanding of crypto derivatives: perpetual futures, funding, liquidation dynamics, margin, and risk
- Full-stack ownership from data to execution: strong Python in production, not only research notebooks
- Strong validation discipline: out-of-sample testing, walk-forward testing, multiple-testing correction
- Ability to assess whether an edge survives turnover, fees, spreads, slippage, and capacity constraints
- Comfortable being the sole owner of the desk at the outset, without a research team behind them
Nice to Have
- MSc or PhD in mathematics, finance, computer science, or another STEM field
- Portfolio management experience across crypto, equities, and options
- Market-neutral or multi-manager pod experience
- Cross-exchange collateral management experience
- Familiarity with DeFi market structure, tokenized securities, AI and robotics equities
What we offer:
- Existing infrastructure: multi-exchange data pipelines, historical data, signal library, backtesting engine, execution and monitoring on Google Cloud
- Licensed fund structure with independent monthly NAV and independent Risk Manager
- Self-custody through an MPC wallet
- Short decision chain and a fast route from strategy production to live capital
Compensation:
The role combines a competitive fixed component with direct participation in the performance of the book:
- Fixed compensation
- The PM receives 20% of P&L above an 11% annual hurdle, after the desk's own costs
- The incentive is subject to a high-water mark and loss carry-forward, aligning compensation with sustained rather than one-period performance
- 50% of the performance award is paid on determination, with the remaining 50% deferred for twelve months and subject to clawback
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