AI Scientist, Quantitative Research - Quantitative Trading & Research

Overview

The Quantitative Trading & Research (QTR) group at J.P. Morgan is focused on systematic trading across diverse asset classes including FX, Rates, Commodities, Credit, and Equity. Within QTR, the AI Market Lab integrates quantitative research, advanced artificial intelligence, market microstructure insights, and high-performance engineering to pioneer the next-gen electronic trading technologies, covering areas such as signal research, pricing, market making, execution, portfolio design, risk management, and the supporting production systems.

Role Responsibilities

• Initiate and conduct pre-training of transformer-based and financial time-series foundational models from the ground up using extensive datasets encompassing markets, order-book, transactions, and cross-asset information.
• Innovate data encoding methods, tokenization approaches, self-supervised objectives, model structures, and distributed training techniques tailored for financial time series.
• Customize foundation models via fine-tuning and post-training for various finance-focused objectives including alpha generation, pricing, market making, trade execution, and risk control.
• Research the fundamental aspects of model scalability, cross-instrument and asset-class transferability, robustness across market regimes, data utilization efficiency, and balance model accuracy with inference speed and cost.
• Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks that link pre-training performance measures to financially relevant outcomes such as out-of-sample forecasting success, simulated trading performance, transaction cost impacts, capacity constraints, and real-time markout assessments.
• Collaborate with machine learning infrastructure teams to build modular training, checkpointing, evaluation, and model deployment systems.

Essential Qualifications

• Possess an advanced degree (Master's, PhD, or equivalent) in machine learning, computer science, statistics, mathematics, operations research, engineering, or related quantitative disciplines.
• A minimum of two years' hands-on experience in a relevant quantitative or AI research role.
• Proven track record of independently pre-training large-scale transformer, LLM, multimodal, or time-series models from scratch (beyond mere API or prompt usage).
• Competency in designing and implementing large-scale data processing pipelines and distributed training systems utilizing frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Strong expertise in key aspects of training large models including optimization algorithms, parallel computing strategies, mixed precision training, checkpointing, experimental design, ablation studies, and benchmarking.
• Clear demonstration of research or technical excellence through successful large-scale model training projects, impactful research publications, contributions to open-source tools, or live production deployments.

Preferred Experience

• Background in fine-tuning and post-training methods for forecasting, ranking, decision-making, or structured prediction tasks.
• Previous work involving time-series foundation models, limit-order-book modeling, multimodal financial data integration, or cross-asset transfer learning.
• Experience within quantitative trading environments—especially electronic market making, high-frequency trading, systematic investing—with models deployed in live markets.
• Contributions published in leading machine learning conferences or substantial experience developing large-scale model training infrastructures.

Company Summary

J.P. Morgan is a premier global financial services firm providing strategic advice and a variety of financial products to leading corporations, governments, affluent individuals, and institutional investors worldwide. Their client-centric approach emphasizes trust, long-term partnerships, and achieving strategic business goals.

Diversity & Inclusion

Committed to diversity and inclusion, the company values the unique talents within its global workforce and offers equal employment opportunities. It does not discriminate based on protected attributes such as race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital or veteran status, pregnancy, disability, or any legally protected category. Reasonable accommodations for religious practices or disability requirements are provided upon request.

Team Information

The Commercial & Investment Bank division operates globally across banking, markets, securities services, and payments, serving corporations, governments, and institutions in more than 100 countries with advisory, capital raising, risk management, and liquidity services.