Director, Electronic Execution Quantitative Research

The mandate

The Director will lead a permanent quantitative research discipline for electronic execution decisions, from hypothesis formation through simulation, controlled experiment, deployment approval and realised-outcome review. The remit is not to reward research volume or back-tested performance. It is to ensure execution logic remains interpretable, measurable and governed when market conditions, order characteristics and implementation constraints change.

The first quarter will reconstruct the research-to-decision path for current methods without assuming a particular asset class, venue or platform. The appointee will examine timestamp quality, benchmark choice, selection bias, fill assumptions, market impact, opportunity cost and the difference between simulated and live results. That evidence will identify where methods need retirement, monitoring or better experimental design.

Authority includes setting research standards, approving controlled trials within delegation, stopping methods that breach performance or conduct guardrails and requiring independent replication before material release. Trading decisions, risk limits and market-conduct determinations retain separate owners. The Director must create an explicit escalation route where a performance concern may also have a conduct or control dimension.

By month six, all active methods should have an approved objective, versioned implementation, evaluation benchmark, use boundary and monitoring trigger. By month twelve, live-versus-simulated drift should be measured consistently, experiments should isolate incremental impact, and retirement decisions should be evidence-led rather than deferred by sunk research effort.

The role includes developing researchers who can defend assumptions, publish negative results and communicate uncertainty to non-specialists. Durable research governance will preserve reproducibility and institutional learning without exposing confidential methods beyond authorised forums.

What you will own

• Define standards for data provenance, timestamp integrity, leakage control, benchmark selection and reproducible research.
• Require execution hypotheses to state mechanism, eligible population, expected benefit, failure mode and decision threshold.
• Establish simulation protocols that represent fill uncertainty, impact, latency, queue position and opportunity cost proportionately.
• Approve controlled experiments within delegation and require guardrails for risk, conduct and operational consequence.
• Compare live performance with simulated expectation by market state and order characteristic, not only aggregate average.
• Suspend or restrict methods when drift, instability, unintended behaviour or evidence weakness crosses tolerance.
• Maintain a versioned research and decision archive, including negative and inconclusive results.
• Build senior research leaders through independent replication, chaired review and deployment accountability.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior leadership of electronic execution research from data through live outcome evaluation.
• Describe a back-test whose apparent improvement disappeared after correcting selection, fill or impact assumptions.
• Show how you designed a controlled experiment while protecting market-conduct and risk boundaries.
• Evidence monitoring that identified state-dependent deterioration concealed by aggregate execution statistics.
• Provide an example of retiring a method despite prior investment or stakeholder attachment.
• Explain how you kept quantitative, trading, technology and compliance accountabilities distinct.
• Show development of researchers who could publish negative evidence and challenge senior sponsors.

Working terms and boundaries

• This permanent full-time appointment owns research standards and delegated trial or method restrictions.
• Trading authority, risk limits, conduct decisions and production engineering remain with named accountable functions.
• Incentives reflect reproducibility, realised decision quality and team depth, not raw research output or back-test gains.
• Hybrid attendance is expected for research review, controlled releases and significant outcome governance.
• Personal trading, venue, provider and prior research relationships require conflict clearance.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 5 October 2026. Mandate reference QNT-PER-2026-TYO-09.