If you are passionate about innovation and committed to making a meaningful impact at Akuna, please see our Campus and Experienced roles and apply for those that interest you most.

If you are an international student, your application will be given full consideration. Akuna provides sponsorship to future employees depending on the job offer and the qualifications of the candidate. We sponsor several visa types for full-time and intern employment and candidate qualifications are assessed in accordance with local immigration regulations.

In order to maintain our high selection standards, we review thousands of applications per year to build our Experienced, Junior, and Akunacademy Intern classes. As we are still growing and show no signs of slowing down, we are continuing to hire top tier candidates based on the yearly needs of our teams.

At Akuna we know that you are more than the contents of your resume. We use various tools (depending on the role) to assess our candidates’ skills and qualifications. For example, Trading candidates complete math and personality assessments, whereas Quant and Dev candidates complete a coding challenge. We also occasionally use web interviews, which may seem strange at first, but it gives us the chance to get to know you better and understand your thought process. All of these tools allow us to be as efficient as possible in moving candidates through the process.

Our Development team delivers fast, reliable, scalable and highly-optimized code within a collaborative environment. As a member of the Development Team, you will work alongside other Developers, many with deep experience in the industry, while closely collaborating with members of our Trading and Quant teams. You will have the opportunity to design and implement solutions that meet the needs of a competitive trading environment. Unlike at some larger or more siloed firms, you will gain direct exposure to the overall business and have real impact on advancing Akuna’s trading and financial systems forward. 

Most mornings consist of onsite or remote logins and email/Slack catch-ups before joining your team for a stand-up meeting to discuss project progress and raise any topics or questions for further discussion.  

The remainder of the day may be spent working across a variety of areas including writing, testing, and debugging code, reviewing and providing feedback on teammates’ pull requests, discussing requirements with Traders for upcoming projects, or working with our Trade Support team to release a new component into production. 

• Interns: Our Development Internship is anchored around a challenging development project that will deliver real value to the firm by the time you’re done. You’ll experience a balance of focused project work, combined with classroom training, and opportunities to gain exposure to many other parts of the firm.
• Juniors: Junior Developers begin with a small-scale project to help you get comfortable and familiarize yourself with our systems. This will be combined with more general training opportunities across a variety of technical and trading-specific topics. As you build up experience and demonstrate your ability, we gradually increase project complexity and responsibility.
• Experienced: Our Experienced Developers follow a similar onboarding process as our campus hires, although at an accelerated pace depending on your specific background and prior experience. You and your manager can identify the set of general and Akuna-specific training courses and topics that would be valuable, and tailor your on-boarding process accordingly. This will take shape through a mix of self-directed learning mentorship from other team members.

The development timelines at Akuna are relatively short, the collaboration is high, and the feedback is nearly instantaneous as our ability to move fast is crucial to our continued success. Collaboration is key to efficiently developing the solutions the company needs and is fundamental to how our Development process works. Our feedback cycles are largely data–driven so that we can see if the solution you put in place is achieving the results we expected and in a performant way. We are constantly iterating and evolving our platform based on real-world results and data.   

Akuna’s philosophy is to use the best tool for the job, so we use a variety of languages across various parts of the firm. C++ and Python are the most widely used languages across our Development teams, but we also use JavaScript and C# for web and desktop applications, Scala within our Data Engineering teams, and Verilog within our FPGA Hardware Development team. 

Not having customers means that we only worry about what Akuna needs rather than having to design solutions for every single kind of end user. Although we do have rigorous procedures to ensure that our code is safe to release, there is also no need to put our technology through months of testing before hitting the market. This means our new features are being deployed much quicker than at Big Tech firm with millions of customers. The best part is that the feedback is instantaneous and comes directly from people near you. 

Many of our Devs have read and recommend the following technical books: “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell, “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin, “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas, “Principles of Compiler Design” by Alfred V. Aho & Jeffrey D. Ullman, “The C++ Programming Language” by Bjarne Stroustrup, “Effective Python” by Brett Slatkin, “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann, and “Effective Modern C++” by Scott Meyers. 

Our Quants are self-motivated and interested in finding the best solution to every problem. Working across every aspect of Akuna’s system, you will connect with both traders and developers to innovate on data analysis, modeling, and strategies. As the firm’s architects of automation and machine learning, you will push the limits of exploration while greatly increasing the productivity of our trading team. From hypothesis to research and prototyping you are given the opportunity to challenge yourself, learn from experts and expand Akuna’s reach into new forms of liquidity.

Upon morning arrival, check over systems and tools that you are responsible for to make sure they are working as expected and turn on strategies and monitor their trading performance on the side. Group meetings are held later in the morning to review goals for the day and any issues from the day before. The remainder of the day is spent on project work and interactions with Traders and Developers to better understand the problem at hand. 

• Interns: Quant interns will go through the trader training curriculum. A selection of modelling  topics will be covered ranging from more classical option theory materials to portfolio  construction and high frequency trading. One real-world project will be finished under a senior  team member’s supervision. It is optional to work on one exploratory project in addition to the  real-world one where you can either experiment a new trading style or simply a new technique  on the same strategy. 
• Juniors: Junior Quants will go over a similar training process with the quant interns. After that  period, junior quants will focus on one specific area or strategy which will serve as a knowledge  base for them to expand the understanding to the entire trading/research workflow. 
• Experienced: In addition to learning to use Akuna’s models and trading/research platform, we  periodically hold seminars to share knowledge and learning materials on a wide range of  technical topics. 

The development timelines at Akuna are relatively short, the collaboration is high, and the feedback in instantaneous. On the Quant team, we try to keep the time frame from idea, to analysis, to implementation short. The quick turnaround allows us to test out new ideas quickly, and find out which ones work best. We also systematically test our code and follow development best practices to ensure accuracy, reliability, and robustness of our code.

All of Akuna’s Quant teams work in Python, and C++ experience is an added bonus for Quant Research/ Machine Learning positions.

Many of our Quants have read and strongly recommend “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship” by Robert C. Martin, “Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide” by Alex Reinhart, and “Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and Ipython” by Wes McKinney.

Our Traders are highly competitive individuals who have a passion for finding solutions to complex problems. As a Trader, you will work in a fast-paced and constantly evolving landscape of financial markets. You will work directly with our Senior Traders to make trading decisions and manage risk while also working alongside the Development and Quant teams at Akuna to design new trading strategies and tools used by all desks.

A typical day for our Traders begins by checking overnight news upon arrival, followed by a team position review and risks discussion. As soon as the markets open, trading begins. After market close, Traders partake in a review of the trading day, attend training sessions, and work on strategy analysis and projects. 

• Interns: Our Trading Interns go through an accelerated version of our Junior Trader training program. Led by our dedicate Co-Heads of Trader Training, our program includes option theory, systems training, trading strategy, risk management, and hands-on trading simulations.  
• Juniors: No prior options or trading knowledge is necessary as Junior Traders undertake a 9-month rotation beginning with a 12-week group training program. Led by some of our top Senior Traders, the program includes option theory, systems training, trading strategy, risk management, data analysis, quant modeling and hands-on trading simulations. Junior Traders then graduate into real-time trading rotations and a one-on-one mentorship with a Senior Trader. 
• Experienced: From day 1, experienced hires will familiarize themselves with Akuna’s systems and trading strategies. We look to bring experienced Traders onto teams where they will learn side-by-side with a Senior Trader and provide immediate value-add to our Trading team.  

Programming knowledge is not required for Options Market Making roles, but along with statistics and higher level math, programming is helpful for project work. Python programming is required for Intern and Full Time Quant Trading roles, and C++ is considered a plus.

There are no certifications required to be considered for a Junior/Intern role at Akuna. Once you begin working as a full-time Junior Trader, you will be required to take and pass the Series 57 exam.

Many of our Traders have read and strongly recommend “Options Volatility and Pricing” by Sheldon Natenberg. Although not strictly related to trading, many of our Traders also enjoyed “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb and “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

Infrastructure is exactly that, the core on which the trading system is built and where every piece of software the company uses resides. This means you will be working with people from every department in Akuna (Trading, Development, Quant, Business Operations) on a regular basis. You will need to gain an understanding of the different needs and requirements of these disparate teams, to be flexible and to think on your feet.

IT Infrastructure has a key front-line (Trading) responsibility, as well as executing on longer term engineering projects. Being close to Trading means your typical day can vary based on market conditions and world events –making for an exciting day-to-day experience. This is balanced against our project work where the team constantly strives to improve and automate our existing infrastructure and scale to new products, strategies and markets.

• Interns: Our IT interns get immersed in real-world challenges by helping to buildout the summertime working environment for Akuna and getting into a specifically tailored project.  You’ll start the first week bringing fellow interns either into the office(s) or online, followed by project in one of five different groups in IT’s: Trading Systems, Systems Engineering, Networking, DevOps or Desktop. Here you’ll finish out the internship working side-by-side with industry engineers to complete and present your project to the team.    
• Juniors: Juniors joining IT are put into an operational setting to learn the tools and trade craft of a high paced, demanding yet rewarding environment.  You’ll learn to script and automate smaller parts of the job while honing your skills on smaller projects to help achieve operational success. 
• Experienced: New hires at this level will be put into a 4-week operational rotation to get a deep understanding of how our system works, the tools needed to support them and the various process and procedures for operational success.  After your rotation you, along with your manager, will identify projects to enhance or expand operations and work side-by-side with your fellow engineers. 

Akuna’s IT Infrastructure team mainly works in Python, Bash, and YAML.

Many of our IT Infra team members have read and strongly recommend “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande, “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Wilink & Leif Babin, “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, & George Spafford, “Flashboys” by Michael Lewis, “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sonke Abrens, and “Site Reliability Engineering” by O’Reilly Media