Quant (m/w/d)

px dynamics GmbH; Berlin; Hybrid; EUR 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work Berlin

30 days vacation

VSOP shares

Core hours 9-5

Job summary

px dynamics GmbH in Berlin is a small quantitative trading firm building and running all components in house. You will research price models for intraday energy markets, design trading strategies for the continuous market, and deploy them to live trading, then compare results with backtests.

The team combines backgrounds in physics, statistics and economics, with a strong emphasis on ownership, open source tooling, and a practical path from idea to production.

Qualifications

• Strong academic background in physics, statistics or a quantitative field.
• PhD preferred, but a Master's with real data experience counts.
• We care more about thinking and learning ability than title.

Responsibilities

• Develop price models for the intraday market using weather output, fundamentals and order-book history.
• Design trading strategies for the continuous intraday market with sizing and risk controls.
• Run what you build in production and compare outcomes to backtests.

Skills

Quantitative background

Python proficiency

Statistical thinking

Education

PhD in Physics/Statistics/Quantitative field

Master's degree

Tools

Python

Linux

Open source stack

Job description

Intro

px dynamics is a small quantitative trading firm in Berlin and Cologne. We are four people. We trade European short-term power markets systematically, on our own account, and we sell trading signals to a few trading desks. We build and run everything ourselves: the data, the models, the execution and the servers. We are looking for one more person to research and run trading strategies with us.

The problem

What we try to understand is price formation in a physical system. The European power market is a stack of many technologies, from nuclear and gas to wind, solar and batteries, each with its own economics, interconnected across borders so that the price in one zone depends on the weather in another. The mix shifts continuously as the energy system transforms, and the market trades it down to the last minutes before delivery. It's a fantastically complex problem and nobody has run out of things to learn.

A well-traded short-term market helps a system with a lot of wind and sun run efficiently, and we like that our work has that effect.

What you would work on

• Price models for the intraday market, built from weather model output, fundamentals and our own order-book history.

• Trading strategies for the continuous intraday market, together with the sizing and the risk limits that go with them.

• Running what you build in production, and comparing what it did with what the backtest said it would do.

You take each of these from the first idea to live trading, so we don't split the work much along the value chain.

How we work

The team has backgrounds in machine learning, particle physics, information systems and economics, and together over two decades of experience in energy markets. Everyone works across research, trading systems, data and infrastructure. We think people do their best work when it is truly theirs.

Everyone also does the ordinary work, from scheduling to the occasional invoice, because we want to stay small, and a small team only works if everyone chips in. Live systems need looking after, so monitoring on weekends and holidays rotates through the team.

Our stack is open source and our own code from top to bottom, and we run it ourselves, so anyone here can read and change every part of it. We write most of that code with AI coding assistants, and the repository, the documentation and the data are organised so that both people and models can work with them.

Who you are

• You have a strong academic background in physics, statistics or another quantitative field, typically a PhD, but a master's degree and real work with real data count just as much. We care more about how you think than about the title.

• You want to understand the energy system itself, not only the methods you apply to it. The domain matters to us as much as the modelling. While you'll find plenty of support and knowledge in the team, you are comfortable taking ownership for your learning journey.

• You have a very strong understanding of statistics and genuinely view the world probabilistically. We value that more than familiarity with any particular class of models.

• You know what clean code and a clean architecture look like, and you hold the code to that standard whether you or an assistant wrote it. Writing Python by hand matters less than it used to; knowing when to do it anyway, for example when you are iterating on a statistical model, matters more. You do not need to be a software engineer.

• You would rather be corrected than be wrong, and you can take an idea all the way to production yourself.

Nice to have

• Experience in power markets or as a quant trader.

• Time series modelling. R, where it is the better tool.

• You are at home on Linux.

• Some familiarity with Rust or C.

What we offer

• Hybrid work from our Berlin office

• 30 days vacation

• VSOP (virtual shares)

• Core hours roughly 9 to 5, and flexibility when life happens

• A small team where your models trade

Practicalities

English is our working language; German is helpful but not required. We welcome applications regardless of gender, background or where you studied, and we particularly welcome applications from women.