Systematic Credit Strategies Research - Associate

Role Description

SMBC is hiring an Associate to join the Systematic Credit Trading team, focused on quantitative analytics, model-driven execution, and real-time trading decision support for corporate bonds. This role is designed for candidates with prior full-time experience in fixed income, trading, or quantitative development who are ready to operate closer to the trading desk and take ownership of production analytics, models, and workflows.

You will work directly with traders and senior quants on systematic strategies across U.S. investment-grade and high-yield credit, contributing to model development, trading tools, automation, and performance analysis. This is a front-office role with increasing responsibility, real PnL impact, and exposure to markets, clients, and execution.

Role Objectives: Delivery

• Own and enhance systematic trading models, signals, and feature pipelines for corporate bonds across liquidity regimes.
• Analyze market microstructure, TRACE data, RFQ dynamics, and transaction cost drivers at the bond and portfolio level.
• Design, build, and maintain production-quality analytics, dashboards, and monitoring tools used daily by traders and quants.
• Contribute to RFQ automation, pricing logic, and dealer/ECN workflows, improving speed, consistency, and execution quality.
• Monitor model behavior, inventory risk, PnL attribution, and execution performance, identifying issues and opportunities in real time.
• Partner with trading and sales to translate data and analytics into actionable trading ideas and client insights.
• Mentor junior analysts and help set technical and analytical best practices on the desk.
• Over time, develop into a quantitative trader, execution specialist, or analytics-driven client-facing role, depending on strengths and interests.

Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Finance, Statistics, or related quantitative field.
• 2-6 years of full-time professional experience in fixed income trading, quantitative research, trading analytics, or front-office engineering.
• Demonstrated experience working with bond, rates, or credit market data in a real production or trading environment.
• Strong programming skills in Python for analysis, modeling, and tooling; solid experience with SQL; familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript or modern dashboards a plus.
• Strong analytical foundation: statistics, time-series analysis, optimization, or applied machine learning.
• Ability to reason about liquidity, pricing, execution costs, and risk in less-liquid markets.
• Clear communicator with strong attention to detail and comfort working directly with traders.
• Direct experience with corporate credit markets, bond math, TRACE data, or RFQ-based trading.
• Exposure to FIX, MarketAxess, Tradeweb, Bloomberg, or other fixed-income trading platforms/APIs.
• Experience building real-time or near-real-time analytics for trading or risk monitoring.
• Familiarity with risk metrics such as DV01, CS01, spread risk, or inventory risk.
• Experience supporting or improving systematic or rules-based trading strategies.

Additional Requirements

SMBC’s employees participate in a Hybrid workforce model that provides employees with an opportunity to work from home, as well as, from an SMBC office. SMBC requires that employees live within a reasonable commuting distance of their office location. Prospective candidates will learn more about their specific hybrid work schedule during their interview process. Hybrid work may not be permitted for certain roles, including, for example, certain FINRA-registered roles for which in-office attendance for the entire workweek is required.

SMBC provides reasonable accommodations during candidacy for applicants with disabilities consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application process, please let us know at accommodations@smbcgroup.com.