Symmetry Investments | Many Varied Roles | REMOTE or VISA (London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jersey) | D, Julia, Kotlin, other functional and systems languages | Full-Time, Fixed Term, Flexible
Roles we are hiring for:
- Technical: developers, DevOps, infosec, documentation, UX, process designers, documentation, team and tool design, Windows and Linux desktop support, system / server administration
- Business: risk, operations, legal, compliance, finance, administrative, organisational design, documentation, internal communication, investor relations processes
- Investment: economics, analytics, portfolio research, investment research
- Market Data: contract administration, data cleaning
- Other: qualified chartered or management accountants, as well as executive assistants for a variety of potential roles
Qualities and traits we value: Curiosity, Extreme motivation, Mechanical sympathy, Extreme intellectual capabilities, A love of tinkering, Resourcefulness, Good taste and love of beauty, Common sense and commercial orientation, Practical people who are at the same time unreasonable when they ought to be, Highly individual people oriented to promoting survival and flourishing of the group
Symmetry Investments is a post startup c. USD 6.5 billion alternative asset management company with around 220 people across multiple time zones and locations. Our core technology team has been remote first for some time, and the whole company is following suit, post-COVID.
I'm one of the three people running the firm, responsible amongst other things for technology across the firm and I’m posting this myself. That should give you an idea both about how seriously we take technology and the culture of the firm. We are three years into a period of transformation from initially a fairly standard enterprise finance technology approach to something new that recognises the importance of both the humane and the technical for discretionary portfolio management and for the business of running an alternative investment manager.
It's not easy to integrate practitioners who may spend most of their day programming but are oriented towards solving their business problems with developers who are specialists in programming. To achieve this, we wrote a little functional DSL that's now in production. Type inference of returns and parameters using inequality constraints is in a feature branch and there is plenty more to do on the language itself as well as the ecosystem around it. What might be a project in itself elsewhere can be just a set of functions in Symmetry Integration Language. The language is written in D, we hosted dconf last year and will do so again this year. So we are looking for outstanding native code developers who would like to write D as well as people to work with practitioners writing Symmetry Integration Language. Also looking for people to write documentation and work on the build.
It's quite a creative place where we encourage a degree of courage amidst practical constraints, and we are open to doing things a different way if it's commercially sound and in the interests of our investors. We look for virtues and capabilities over only experience and credentials although those things aren't a disadvantage. Do not let a lack of credentials or qualifications prevent you from applying. We've recently hired experts with C++, Common Lisp, D, Haxe, Julia and Perl backgrounds, and are happy to bring them up to speed with the tools we use.
Compensation is currently not quite at Netflix standards but is generous to very generous over time by broad technology industry standards. We recognise and reward technical accomplishment and have a very flat structure - don't be surprised if our founder and CIO starts asking you questions about your work.
Symmetry Talks:
- All Spreadsheets Must Die (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzi9csb9_kk)
- Lessons from a DSL where all you have is Ranges (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btuzslkrmza)
- Alternative Investment Management (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rmq-4rwgis)
Links:
- Symmetry GitHub (https://github.com/symmetryinvestments)
- Symmetry Autumn of Code (https://dlang.org/blog/2020/08/23/symmetry-autumn-of-code-20...)
Contact: Email laeeth at kaleidic.io and cc jthompson at symmetryinvestments dot com