Quantitative Analyst Intern (Digital Assets Market Making - HFT) - Brussels

The role

You will work alongside quantitative researchers, traders and engineers to analyse market and trading data, test hypotheses through backtesting and simulation, and build tools that improve strategy performance and risk visibility. This role involves studying liquidity, price discovery, and execution quality across digital asset venues.

What you will do

• Analyse multi-venue top-of-book and depth data, trades, orders, fills and cancels
• Build and validate latency-aware, event-driven backtests
• Measure spread capture, forward markouts, fees and adverse selection
• Build reusable Python tools and data pipelines using modern columnar analysis and SQL
• Study cross-venue price discovery, lead–lag relationships, fair-value construction and spot–perpetual basis
• Support live strategies through PnL, inventory and exposure analysis
• Evaluate liquidity-program economics
• Present findings clearly, including assumptions, limitations, risks and recommended next steps

Required qualifications

• Pursuing or recently completed a degree in mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics, quantitative finance or a related field
• Proficient in Python for data analysis
• Comfortable with SQL, Git and command-line workflows
• Understand limit order books, order types, maker/taker mechanics, matching and priority rules, spreads, market depth and how trades move prices
• Can reason about the order lifecycle from signal to acknowledgement and fill, including exchange APIs, latency, queue position, partial fills, cancellations, fees, slippage and adverse selection
• Understand key differences between spot and perpetual futures, including basis, funding, leverage, liquidation risk, settlement currencies and residual exposure
• Comfortable with probability, statistics, time-series analysis and evaluating noisy results
• Communicate findings and limitations clearly in English

Nice to have

• Experience with ClickHouse or another analytical database
• Built or analysed something yourself—such as an order-book study, trading bot, exchange connector, backtest, execution simulator or market-data pipeline
• Experience working with exchange WebSocket/REST APIs and asynchronous market-data pipelines
• Exposure to Rust or another systems programming language
• Experience with tick/order-book data, event-driven simulation or execution modelling
• A technical project demonstrating sustained interest in systematic trading or market microstructure

Benefits

• 6 month paid internship
• Accommodation provided for entirety or part of it
• Opportunity to learn about digital assets and blockchain
• Working from one of Brussels newest, nicest and most advanced office spaces
• Global, collaborative and tech-driven environment
• Autonomy & Impact

Before you apply

• Interview with Talent Acquisition representative
• Interview with Hiring Manager
• Recruitment Challenge
• Background checks are a prerequisite to join Keyrock

About the company

Keyrock is a global, remote-first team of 200+ people providing liquidity across 80+ centralized and decentralized exchanges. They run a full spectrum of capital markets businesses including market making, high-frequency trading, options, OTC, DeFi trading desks, advisory, and asset management.