Quantitative Research Analyst (Systematic Trading Strategies)

Contract: Full-time, permanent
Salary: AED 35,000 per month in a zero-tax environment
Reports to: Managing Director

About the Role

We are appointing an analyst to own the development of new systematic trading strategies, reporting directly to the Managing Director. The successful candidate will carry each strategy from initial hypothesis through to live deployment and will be accountable for the work throughout.

A significant proportion of findings may contradict established practice or preceding conclusions. The role rewards candidates who investigate unfamiliar results rather than dismissing them.

Principal Responsibilities

• Develop new systematic strategies end to end, from initial hypothesis through data preparation, backtesting and validation to hand-off into live trading.
• Design and conduct backtests, and quantify the sources of divergence between simulated and live performance, including execution, liquidity and transaction-cost effects.
• Analyse trade-level data to establish where returns are generated and where they are lost.
• Quantify the expected impact of each finding so that competing recommendations may be ranked on a common basis.
• Subject conclusions to out-of-sample testing, controls for overfitting and consideration of alternative explanations before presenting them.
• Implement strategy logic in the trading platform, directing AI coding assistants, and monitor deployed strategies for anomalies in execution and performance.
• Present findings, their quantified impact and the associated risks, together with a recommended course of action.

The position is based in Dubai. Candidates located elsewhere must be willing to relocate for no less than 50 per cent of working time.

Basic Requirements

Effectiveness

• Experience of a material decision having been taken on the strength of your analysis, and knowledge of the outcome.
• Capacity to work effectively as the sole analyst, without a team across which workload or credit is distributed.
• Evidence of having previously reached an unusually high standard in something demanding, whether professional or otherwise.
• Disposition to treat an assertion that something cannot be done as a proposition to be tested, and to exercise your own judgement where no guidance is available.
• Ability to become effective in an unfamiliar domain quickly.
• Intellectual honesty: willingness to report findings that contradict a position you have previously advanced.
• Daily, substantive use of AI coding and research tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Copilot.
• Established repeatable AI-assisted systems rather than isolated prompts, with the ability to articulate their effect on output quality or speed.

Problem Solving

• Exceptional analytical ability: capacity to structure an ambiguous problem, decompose it and identify which component determines the answer.
• Rigorous empirical judgement, including appropriate scepticism towards unusually favourable results and the discipline to establish the cause before drawing a conclusion.

Communication

• Excellent written and spoken English and ability to convey a technical result to a non-specialist audience without loss of substance.
• Ability to sustain a position under challenge by reference to evidence, and to revise it where the evidence warrants.

Preferred

• Three or more years in quantitative research, systematic trading or data-intensive analytics, or a demonstrable record of independently developing and testing systematic strategies.
• Familiarity with backtest failure mechanisms, including look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, in-sample parameter selection, and unmodelled transaction and borrowing costs.
• Working knowledge of equity market mechanics, including order types, liquidity, trading halts and transaction costs, and experience of US equity markets.
• Ability to read and modify object-oriented code, for example C#.
• Degree in mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, engineering or quantitative finance.

What We Offer

• Remuneration of AED 35,000 per month, free of personal income tax.
• Annual bonus linked to the performance of the strategies you develop and an annual salary review.
• Full ownership of your research agenda from the outset, with no intermediate management layer between you and the decision-maker.
• UAE employment visa, medical insurance and relocation support covering flights, initial accommodation and visa administration.