03Careers

A firm worth spending a career in.

Cardinal is a small firm in one office, trading its own capital, built to last decades. We hire researchers and engineers who want to be part of that, people who'd rather go deep on a hard problem for years than rotate through it.

We don't care where you studied or what you traded before. We care what you can figure out, what you can build, and whether you'll still be curious about it in ten years.

4Open roles
1Office
3Steps to an offer
1Week for the take-home

What we look for

  • Depth. You'd rather understand one thing completely than many things a little.
  • Range. You can do the math, write the code, and explain it to the desk.
  • Taste. You know which problems are worth a year.
  • Ownership. You want to build something and stay to run it.
  • Honesty about results, especially your own.

What we don't

  • Where you studied.
  • What you traded before, or whether you traded at all.
  • A finance background. Most of us didn't have one.
  • Years of experience as a number.
  • Cover letters.

Open roles

Four seats.

All in person, in Washington, DC. Top-of-market compensation, a research budget you control, and problems that are yours for as long as you want them.

Nothing that fits? Write anyway. Most of the people here arrived before there was a role for them.

The process

Three steps, three weeks.

We'd rather see what you can do than hear about it, so most of the process is work, not interviews.

01

A conversation

An hour with someone who'd work next to you. Bring something you built or figured out, and be ready to go deep on it.

02

A take-home study

A real question on real order-book data. Take a week. We tell you what a good answer looks like so you can spend the time on the work.

03

A day with the team

Present the study, defend it, then sit on the desk through a session. We're hiring a colleague, not a score.

A decision within three weeks, and a reason either way.

Apply

Send whatever shows how you think.

careers@cardinalq.com

Put the role in the subject line. Attach a paper, a repo, a study you ran, or a thing you were wrong about. We read every application ourselves.