SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 250,000 - 350,000 / annual
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, enabling individuals to trade on real-world outcomes across politics, economics, sports, culture, and current affairs. The platform traded $21B in 2025 and is growing rapidly as an alternative news source.
You will be the first dedicated quantitative researcher on Polymarket's new perpetual futures product, serving as the mathematical foundation for the exchange. Working directly with the engineering team, you will build pricing and risk infrastructure from the ground up. Your work will directly determine how the exchange operates: mark price construction, funding rate design and calibration, margin parameter setting for new asset listings, liquidation engine mechanics, funding settlements, and risk limits.
This is a high-ownership role requiring you to move from research through specification to production code, with direct accountability for monitoring live market performance. You will investigate mark price anomalies and source divergences in real time, iterating on methodology as failure modes surface.
Key responsibilities:
- Design and maintain methodology for aggregating spot prices across multiple external venues, including outlier removal, source weighting, and staleness handling to ensure reliable mark prices for the liquidation engine
- 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 in normal and stressed conditions
- Run 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
- Ship your own research into production, closing the loop between modeling and implementation with direct ownership of continuously running systems
- Monitor live model performance and iterate on methodology when real market conditions reveal failure modes
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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 perpetual futures exchange mechanics; ability to design and defend a complete funding rate formula, index aggregation methodology, and margin tier model from first principles, including failure modes under adversarial or illiquid conditions
- Strong market microstructure intuition: understanding of how prices form across venues, how liquidity and staleness distort aggregated signals, and what happens to multi-source indices when sources disagree or go dark
- Ability to implement your own research: write rigorous specifications and build them in code; do not hand off to engineers
- Strong Python programming skills; comfortable writing production-quality code, not just research notebooks
- Rigorous thinking about edge cases: models account for violent market moves, data outages, and source conflicts before they happen
- 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
