Software Engineer, Trading and Portfolio Analytics

The Opportunity

As a Software Engineer, Trading and Portfolio Analytics, at Nascent, you’ll design, implement, and maintain the front-office systems that power quantitative research and live trading. You’ll build low-latency prime-broker integrations for reliable execution across new markets and asset classes, evaluate past trades and transaction costs to shape and optimize execution algorithms, and deliver real-time risk monitors that compute and expose portfolio-level metrics (including pre- and post-trade audits). You’ll also own production reliability and automate reporting pipelines for P&L attribution, trading statistics, and compliance records so the desk can move faster with confidence. 

You will thrive here if you take end-to-end ownership: you spot gaps, design pragmatic solutions, ship them, and iterate from real feedback. You enjoy equal parts building new systems and refining what’s already running, and you bring a bias for automation, testing, and observability so reliability scales with speed. You’re curious and methodical, able to deep-dive into unfamiliar stacks, ask the right questions, and change course when the data demands it. If you’re the type to stay calm under pressure and love small, collaborative teams, then this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain front-office systems that directly support quantitative research, analytics and trading workflows
• Develop robust low-latency integrations with execution venues to ensure seamless and reliable execution in new markets and asset classes

• Evaluate past trades and transaction costs to building and optimize execution algorithms
• Build real-time risk monitoring systems that compute and expose portfolio-level risk metrics, including pre and post-trade audits
• Ensure production reliability through integration testing and automated monitoring/alerting frameworks 

• Automate reporting pipelines for PnL attribution, trading statistics and compliance records to streamline operational needs

About you

• You thrive in ambiguity and less-structured environments and feel comfortable building structure and executing your own plans.
• You get energy from both starting new projects and optimizing/maintaining what you’ve built as well as working closely with interdisciplinary teams.
• You’re naturally curious and can independently deep-dive into unfamiliar tools or topics.
• You can identify potential areas for improvement and have the high level of ownership required to continually improve our systems.

Preferred Experience 

• 1-3 years of professional software engineering experience in a front-office environment
• Bachelors or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, statistics or related field
• Business knowledge of financial instruments, market microstructure, trade lifecycle, risk identification/mitigation or portfolio optimization 
• Expertise in writing clean, modular and maintainable code
• Proficiency in building front-office tools for traders such as execution systems. 
• A basic foundation in statistical principles, including but not limited to correlation analysis, A/B testing, and the capability to perform transaction cost analysis.
• Preference to a candidate with experience in Python and at least one other high-performance compiled language such as C++ or Rust.

About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We’ve backed 100+ early-stage teams that we believe can change markets and expand what’s possible. At Nascent, we combine that venture + market pedigree with product-grade engineering to turn research into revenue: experiments that ship fast, are evaluated rigorously, and move P&L. We focus on models, low-latency infrastructure, and resilient systems that compound performance over time.

Our Team & Culture

We’re an interdisciplinary team of engineers, quants, and operators who treat skill-building like a sport. The culture is competition + curiosity: push to win, share learnings, and iterate publicly through red-teams, internal games, and post-mortems. Autonomy isn’t a perk — it’s how we ship. Day-to-day you’ll be in 2-pizza squads with end-to-end ownership, maker calendars, and a Decision SLA of <24 hours. We prefer guardrails over ceremony and measure success by repeatable edges and measurable outcomes.

Principles that drive our team & work

• Compete to win
• Explore, experiment, play
• Always be building
• Seek and speak truth
• Own your shit.

What We Offer

• Day-0 keys to models, data, and compute; you start experimenting from day one.
• Competitive total comp with strong bonus upside tied to performance.
• Remote-first, distributed team with frequent in-person sprints and retreats.
• Hardware & home-office stipend, conference and learning budgets.
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical/dental/vision), life insurance.
• 16 weeks fully-paid parental leave + supported return to work.
• Retirement matching, open vacation policy, flexible hours.
• On-call compensation, strong SRE/runbook culture, and time for focused work.
• A paved road from prototype → CI/CD → production telemetry and evaluation.

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome diverse perspectives.