Job detail for Quantitative Researcher

About Polymarket

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform. We enable individuals to express views on real-world events by trading on outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. Built as a peer-to-peer marketplace with no centralized "house," Polymarket aggregates diverse opinions into transparent, market-based probabilities that reflect collective expectations about the future.

We're growing fast — both in terms of volume ($21B traded in 2025) and adoption as an alternative news source. Our ambition is to become a ubiquitous beacon of truth in global media and we need your help adding fuel to the fire.

About the Role

Polymarket is launching perpetual futures, and this role is the mathematical foundation the exchange runs on. You'll be the first dedicated quant on the perps product, working directly with the engineering team to build the pricing and risk infrastructure from the ground up. Your mandate covers the core mechanics of the exchange: how mark prices are constructed, how funding rates are designed and calibrated, and how margin parameters are set when new assets get listed. The liquidation engine, the funding settlements, the risk limits on every listed asset — all of it depends on the work you do in this role.

This is a high-ownership, low-handoff role. You will move from research to specification to production code, and you will monitor what you build in live markets. We are looking for someone who finds that accountability motivating, not exhausting — someone who has been in that seat before and knows what it takes to get it right.

What You'll Do

• Design and maintain the methodology for aggregating spot prices across multiple external venues, including outlier removal, source weighting, and staleness handling, so the mark price the liquidation engine depends on is always reliable

• Build and calibrate the funding rate formula from first principles: premium calculation, interest rate components, clamping logic, and settlement cadence, tuned to keep perp prices anchored to spot across normal and stressed market conditions

• Run the quantitative analysis for every new asset listing, determining initial margin, maintenance margin, leverage tiers, and max open interest based on historical volatility and liquidity data

• Write formal, rigorous specifications for pricing methodologies and edge case handling that engineers can build directly from, with no ambiguity left to interpretation

• Ship your own research into production, close the loop between modeling and implementation, and take direct ownership of continuously running systems

• Monitor live model performance, investigate mark price anomalies and source divergences as they happen, and iterate on methodology when failure modes surface in real markets

What We're Looking For

• Quant experience at a perpetuals exchange or HFT firm, with direct, hands-on ownership of mark price construction, funding rate design, or margin modeling in production

• Deep understanding of perp exchange mechanics — you can design and defend a complete funding rate formula, index aggregation methodology, and margin tier model from first principles, including how each breaks under adversarial or illiquid conditions

• Strong market microstructure intuition: you understand how prices form across venues, how liquidity and staleness distort aggregated signals, and what happens to a multi-source index when sources disagree or go dark

• The ability to implement your own research — you write rigorous specs and then build them in code; you do not hand off to engineers and walk away

• Strong programming skills in Python; comfortable writing production-quality code, not just research notebooks

• Rigorous thinking about edge cases: your models account for violent market moves, data outages, and source conflicts before they happen, not after

• (Plus) Experience designing or working with multi-source price aggregation or oracle systems

• (Plus) Background in execution or market making at a trading firm

• (Plus) Familiarity with on-chain data sources and decentralized price feeds

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity

• Unlimited PTO

• Full Health, Vision, & Dental coverage

• 401k match

• Hardware setup: new MacBook Pro, big display, & accessories

Pay Transparency

Base salary range: $250,000 to $350,000 annually, plus equity and benefits.

This range reflects a good-faith estimate for this position. Experience levels vary widely within a title here, so please reach out even if your expectations fall outside it. We're always happy to chat.