Quantitative Research Platform Engineer — Founding Technical Hire

Our client is a systematic investment firm that already trades live across liquid markets on infrastructure built in-house on Google Cloud. It is now building its dedicated quantitative research and engineering team in Dubai, and this is the first hire: the engineer who owns the research platform.

A working backtesting and optimisation stack exists today. Your mandate is to turn it into a distributed research platform that can run large experimental workloads across assets, models, parameters and timeframes, with correctness, statistical validity and reproducibility built into the system rather than left to the researcher. You will work directly with the founder, shape how experiments are represented, executed and validated, and own the architecture and implementation. This is greenfield work with unusual influence over how the platform is built.

What you will build

A distributed research engine running thousands of parallel backtests and optimisation campaigns on elastic, Spot-capable GCP compute, with scheduling, retries, failure recovery, monitoring and cost control. Deterministic, versioned research datasets and a feature computation and caching layer, with ownership of point-in-time correctness, timestamps, historical universes, corporate actions and data lineage. Large-scale parameter and model search with research validity built in: walk-forward evaluation, purged and embargoed splits, strict holdouts, leakage prevention, transaction-cost sensitivity and multiple-testing-aware evaluation. A model-composition layer that moves research from single signals to composed strategies and portfolio-level simulation. And full reproducibility, with every result traceable to code, container, data, features, parameters and validation configuration, driven by a declarative strategy specification shared between research and production.

Within six months the core platform is in production use and existing research is migrating onto it. Within twelve, it is the firm's standard research environment across multiple asset classes.

Who this suits

You have personally built or materially owned infrastructure for quantitative research, backtesting, simulation or large-scale numerical experimentation, most likely at a systematic fund, proprietary or HFT trading firm, or an established crypto trading firm. You can talk in detail about a system you built, what broke as it scaled, a research result that looked right and turned out to be wrong, a measured performance improvement you delivered, and an architecture decision you owned.

You bring excellent production Python with substantial numerical and data engineering (NumPy, pandas/Polars, Arrow/Parquet or equivalents); distributed or batch compute on GCP or AWS (deep AWS experience solving equivalent problems is fully relevant); a working understanding of research correctness, from look-ahead and survivorship bias through walk-forward validation, overfitting and transaction costs; and the ability to become productive in a substantial statically typed codebase, since the backtest engine is C#. Professional C# is preferred; otherwise concrete experience extending or debugging a substantial Java or C++ codebase is required. Large-scale hyperparameter optimisation (Optuna, Ray Tune or similar) and experience designing declarative specifications that drive pipelines or experiments are strong advantages. You are willing to relocate to and work from Dubai.

This is not a DevOps, SRE, generic data-engineering or cloud-platform role, and it is not a quant researcher seat. It suits an engineer who wants to own the research platform itself.

Experience: 4–7 years

Stack: Python · GCP (BigQuery, GCS, Batch, Vertex AI) · QuantConnect Lean (C#) · Optuna · Arrow/Parquet

Process

An initial conversation with Platinum & Partners, then three stages with the firm: a 90-minute technical deep-dive with the founder including a short C# source-reading exercise; a live working session of around 2¾ hours built around the platform you would build (no take-home, no algorithm puzzles, nothing to prepare); and a founder conversation on mission, working model and package. Offers are made within three business days of the final interview. All conversations are confidential; the firm's identity is shared once we have spoken.

Apply

Send your CV to tabby@platinumandpartners.com quoting REF 1065, or call +44 (0)203 941 9113.