Software Engineer: Early Career

Role: Software Engineer

Location: Chicago

At Aquatic, we are actively recruiting for a Software Engineer in our Chicago office. In this role you will work directly with some of the best and most experienced researchers and technologists in the financial services industry. You’ll work collaboratively to build systems that are critical to the success of our company.

In this role, you will:

• Directly contribute to the development of Aquatic’s market prediction and trading platform
• Get exposure to applied machine learning techniques and quantitative finance
• Apply hands-on software development in Python, C++, Java, and other languages
• Learn to manage the full lifecycle of software engineering, including design, testing, deployment, and operations
• Adopt modern development practices including Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming, Configuration as Code, and Infrastructure as Code
• Gain experience in execution, trading, or research system architecture
• Learn to use automated tests to accelerate your development and get to “done” sooner
• Gain understanding of Linux system administration concepts and skills

Required Experience: 

• An undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent
• Exposure to modern C++, Python, or Java
• Comfortable working in and with Linux
• Ability and desire to create deterministic, automated tests
• A history of overcoming difficult problems using simple solutions

Candidate Qualities: 

• Eagerness to both learn and teach; desire to rapidly improve your skills through direct mentoring
• Preference for working in a team delivering results and working across large scale solutions aligned with development and business goals
• Comfortable providing and receiving actionable feedback in a collaborative team setting
• Strong bias for action
• Driven by accountability and internal urgency
• Motivated by an ambitious environment and driven colleagues 

Aquatic Capital 

Aquatic is a quantitative trading and investment company recently launched by Jon Graham. Prior to founding Aquatic, Jon was a Partner and Senior Managing Director at Citadel, where he worked for more than 13 years. At Citadel, Jon held numerous senior positions over the years, including head of Statistical Arbitrage and Equity High Frequency, culminating in leading the highly successful Global Quantitative Strategies business.  

Uncluttered by legacy platforms and processes, Aquatic develops systematic investment strategies, enabled by a leading-edge research and development platform. The vision is simple: to build a world class, quantitative trading company with a collaborative team of highly capable researchers and engineers.

This role represents a unique opportunity to join a distinguished and hugely successful quantitative investment manager at the foundational level of building a world class operation from scratch. The firm’s culture will be shaped by collaboration, meritocracy, ambition, and calm determination.