Senior Quant Researcher

Returns is a VC-funded, NSE-empanelled algo provider. We run live, systematic trading strategies on Indian markets for real users with real capital. Our algos trade NIFTY and BANKNIFTY options, stock futures and equities every single day, and we are expanding the research desk that feeds them.
We're looking for a Senior Quant Researcher whose core job is research: finding, testing and validating trading strategies that hold up outside the backtest.
What you'll do
Generate strategy ideas across options, futures and cash equities: premium selling, spreads, breakouts, mean reversion, volatility regimes, market microstructure.
Design rigorous backtests with realistic fills, slippage, STT and charges, margin and lot-size constraints.
Kill bad ideas fast and honestly. Most ideas fail. We want someone who is comfortable saying "no edge" and moving on.
Take the survivors from research to paper trading to live, and keep monitoring them once they're deployed.
Study our existing live algos: where the edge comes from, where it decays, what to tweak.
Write clear research notes that a trader and an engineer can both act on.
What we're looking for
4+ years of hands-on quant research or systematic trading, ideally on Indian F&O.
Deep understanding of options: Greeks, IV vs RV, expiry dynamics, hedging, risk.
Strong statistics and a healthy suspicion of your own results. You know what overfitting, look-ahead bias and survivorship bias look like in practice.
Comfortable working with large intraday datasets (1-minute and tick).
Big plus: you can code your own backtests (Python or Go). You won't be judged on software craft, but self-sufficiency in research code makes you far more effective here.
Why Returns
Your research goes live. Strategies you validate get deployed to paying users, and you see the P&L.
Years of clean minute-level options and futures data, plus an in-house backtest engine, already built.
A small team, fast decisions, zero bureaucracy. You'll work directly with the founders.
Location: Gurugram

Work arrangement
No