Quantitative Researcher — Internship

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About Cortez Capital

Cortez Capital is a proprietary trading firm focused on mid-frequency systematic strategies in U.S. equities. We trade our own capital, which means our research is judged by one standard: does it make money in live markets? We’re a small, technically deep team where researchers own their ideas end to end — from hypothesis, to signal, to a live book. There are no layers between the work you do and the P&L it produces.

The Role

As a Quantitative Researcher Intern, you’ll do the same core work our full-time researchers do: hunt for alpha, build trading models, and — most importantly — determine whether the edge you think you’ve found is real. You’ll work with historical and intraday equity data to develop signals, translate them into strategies under realistic assumptions about costs and capacity, and pressure-test everything before a dollar goes to work.

This is not a “clean the data and make some plots” internship. You’ll be expected to generate original ideas and defend them. Strong internships convert to full-time offers, and strong models go live.

What We’re Looking For

The single most important thing: you have actually developed trading models that have an edge. Not coursework. Not a Sharpe ratio from a tutorial. Real strategies — personal, academic, competition, or professional — where you found a genuine source of return and can explain why it exists, how you validated it, and where it breaks.

Just as important: superior edge validation skills. A positive backtest is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. We want researchers who instinctively distrust their own good results and know how to find out whether they’re real. If you’ve ever watched a beautiful equity curve fall apart out of sample and understood exactly why, we want to talk to you.

Concretely, strong candidates will have most of the following:

• Demonstrated experience developing trading models or systematic signals with a real, articulable edge — and results to back it up
• A deep understanding of how backtests mislead: overfitting, look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, data snooping, and multiple-hypothesis problems
• Rigorous validation methodology — out-of-sample and walk-forward testing, regime and robustness analysis, and honest statistical significance testing
• Realistic modeling of transaction costs, slippage, market impact, and strategy capacity; you know a backtest that ignores these is fiction
• An understanding of alpha decay, and how to distinguish a persistent edge from a lucky one
• Strong programming skills, particularly Python and its scientific/data stack (pandas, NumPy, etc.); SQL and experience with large datasets a plus
• Solid grounding in statistics, probability, and time-series analysis
• Currently pursuing a degree in a quantitative field (mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, engineering, financial engineering, or similar)
What Will Make You Stand Out
• A track record you can show us: a personal trading strategy, a serious research project, a Kaggle/Numerai-style competition, or prior quant experience
• The intellectual honesty to kill your own ideas when the evidence says to

Compensation

Compensation is commensurate with skills and experience and includes:

• A base salary for the duration of the internship
• A percentage profit share on any live trading models you develop that are deployed with firm capital
If your work makes money, you share in it. We think that’s the right way to align incentives — even for interns.

Apply at cortezcapital.win