Options

Options Taking — Quantitative Developer

Applications open

Build the signals, trading algorithms and hedging logic behind your desk's options research. You will use the exchange's supplied pricing and Greeks, shared runtime and research tools to implement strategies in SPY and AAPL options.

What you'll do

Arm: Options — Taking · Places: 2 per team · Team size: 7

About QTE

Queen's Tower Exchange is a financial-markets simulation for Imperial College London students. Student teams develop strategies using live market data and simulated capital.

Responsibilities

Turn research ideas into signals, contract selection and order logic.
Implement position tracking and qualifying stock-hedge algorithms.
Test partial fills, changing Greeks, risk limits and interrupted runs.
Handle daily contract changes, reducing-only states and pre-expiry cutoffs.
Keep deployed strategies within their registered scope and make experiments reproducible.

What success looks like

Algorithms that faithfully implement research ideas, expose their assumptions and respond correctly when market or risk states change. Team performance is measured through risk-adjusted returns and net profit and loss after costs.

Prerequisite knowledge

Confidence writing and debugging programs in Python or another general-purpose language.
Basic knowledge of data structures, tests and version control.
A coding project demonstrating that you can turn a specification into working software.
Interest in learning options and discussing implementation choices with researchers.

No professional finance experience or prior options expertise is required.

Useful, but not required

Python data analysis, numerical computing, APIs or event-driven systems.

What you'll be taught

Much of your learning will take place during a dedicated training week, held after teams are selected and before trading begins. Your Head of Arm will deliver lectures exclusively for the teams in your arm, giving you a strong grounding in the concepts and tools you will use in your role.

Option contracts, Greeks and how trading and hedging affect a position.
QTE's strategy runtime, registration process and research tools.
How execution costs, partial fills and contract transitions affect a strategy.
How to build and test behaviour under exposure cures and daily loss restrictions.
How to connect software diagnostics with the team's trading analysis.

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