Symmetry Investments is a global investment company with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Jersey and Cayman Islands. We have been in business since 2014 after successfully spinning off from a major New York-based hedge fund.

At Symmetry Investments, we seek to engage in intelligent risk-taking to create value for our clients, partners and employees. We derive our edge from our capacity to generate Win-Wins – in the broadest sense. Win-Win is our fundamental ethical and strategic principle. By generating Win-Wins, we can create unique solutions that reconcile perspectives that are usually seen as incompatible or opposites, and encompass the best that each side has to offer:

We integrate fixed-income arbitrage with global macro strategies in a novel way. 

We invent and develop technology that focuses on the potential of human-machine integration.

We build systems where machines do what they do best, supporting people to do what people do best.

We are creating a collaborative meritocracy: a culture where individual contribution serves both personal and collective goals - and is rewarded accordingly. 

We value both ownership thinking AND cooperative team spirit, self-realization AND community.

We're looking for a multiple experienced practitioners to join the business side of a post-startup asset manager.

As we've grown from 30 people to nearly 300, there's a lot of work that's required to manage both the growth in assets that we manage, strategies, and overall complexity of the business.

You've been in this industry for awhile, and know your way around the block. Unlike a typical financial firms which silos people into narrow pigeon holes, we believe in creating roles around people. The skills and product knowledge that you've gained in areas like operations, being a trading assistant, helping with product control, or doing similar analytical roles for a trading business are often transferrable to other roles within the business.

You could be assigned to one of these groups, or sit between them. Groups at Symmetry are not meant to be silos, and every group works very closely with many other ones. People don't typically sit neatly within one group, but will often work on different projects with different groups.

We are interested in people that are open-minded and willing to learn. We're not fans of traditional financial institutional structures, and see little reason to follow in their footsteps. Technical aptitude, resourcefulness and a willingness to figure things out is very valuable. Learned helplessness is unacceptable. The ability to use logic, break down seemingly intractable problems into smaller ones and address them systematically is a massive asset. The ability to code well is valuable, but not a necessity.

Business Solutions is the nerve center coordinating the buildout of the investment team, and enabling them to trade with the setup and expansion of new products, strategies and geographies for the firm. If we are hiring a new PM, what support do they need? How will they execute, on what platforms? What new products would that strategy introduce, and how can our Operations, Compliance, Finance, Risk and Technology teams accomodate it? If we're building a new office, where do we need to put it, and what would that mean for the firm in terms of regulatory or tax risk?

In your first few months, you'll likely find yourself:

- Supporting and learning from two experienced business managers in their day-to-day work, meeting many different groups around the firm and learning how the different puzzle pieces fit together

- helping to coordinate onboarding for new strategies or investment professionals, ensuring that they will have the necessary platforms, risk limits, product approvals that they will need to run their business

- helping with business planning, estimating the work and costs involved with different things that the business would like to do (open a new office in a new jurisdiction, develop a new strategy, etc.), and helping sequencing the activity and documenting decisions, tradeoffs and progress, so we can successfully pull it off.

- Taking time to understand current processes & workflows to identify gaps and improvements to manage the amount of technical debt created (and ideally, pay down our technical debt)

Trading assistants are key people helping coordinate day to day activity between our trading, risk, operations and financing teams. Trading assistants make sure that trades are booked correctly, that their economics are accurately reflected in our book of record, and assist with the day to day management and collapsing of complex trade structures. The TA teams are essential in liasing with both our investment professionals and support teams internally, as well as our counterparties to ensure the smooth operation of our trading desk.

In your first few months, you'll likely:

- Learn the different products that we trade and how our book of records works by booking trades into our systems

- Calculating NPVs for unwinds/novations and liasing with our counterparties

Work with our existing TA team and traders to cover off a segment of our risk takers and work with them for any ad hoc requests, position information and management, queries, exercises, etc.

Our Operations team cover off multiple areas - from product control, T+1 settlement and reconcilation of trades, positions and cash activity, oversee daily trade affirmations and many other responsibilities. The Operations group deals with all post-trade processing at Symmetry; trade affirmation, settlements, lifecycle management, reconciliations, P&L calculations, and collateral and treasury management in collaboration with our treasury front office team.

This is not your typical team of people blindly processing and pushing a button on an excel spreadsheet. Our work is highly analytical, engaging and we contribute to the firms’ enterprise value. It requires a deep understanding of product specific nuances and implications on the broader system to build an operational platform that allows the firm to scale the business.

We work in collaboration with our peers on the investment and non-investment side of the business to not only support them and their front-to-back trading activities but help them generate alpha. Is there a new trading agreement or a way to structure the pricing of their trade which will reduce the operational cost throughout the life of that trade? Is where they are clearing their current flow inefficient from a margin perspective? Operations are the subject matter experts on the trade life cycle and this knowledge is invaluable to traders and their bottom-line P&L.

In your first few months, you'll likely be:

- Learning current daily processes run by ops team (including affirmation, reconciliations, EOD Allocations to PBs and EBs, processing option expiries, processing corporate actions) and identifying areas that are exposed by scaling up equity business.

- Helping to develop reconciliation for positions and financing for swap activity as we look to trade more extensively in that area

- Helping to identify and write up the operational considerations and requirements for building out new market and product capabilities. Coordinating with technology, compliance, risk and business solutions as well as external stakeholders to understand new markets (Locates, order marking, tax, proxy voting, corporate actions, settlement)

- Learning daily T+1 reconciliation of trades, positions and cash activity across accounts. Overseeing the daily exceptions and looking to step in and resolve any aged or risky exceptions by speaking to desk/counterparties/prime brokers

Our interview process is not a cookie cutter process and changes based on the candidate. In general, you should expect:

- An introductory meeting and an aptitude assessment. The aptitude assessment is not a pass/fail test, and we do the same aptitude assessment for all candidates coming to Symmetry - so it cannot be a test of competency for a certain role. We're trying to understand what you're good at and what you're bad at, to try to form a role around your strengths and weaknesses.

- A meeting with a member of the team for an open discussion on your background, experiences and how you may fit into the team.

- A meeting with someone technical. We're not looking for everyone to be a software developer, but we do like having technical people meet candidates to see how they approach complex problems, how they can break them down and solve them, and how they learn.

- Iteration from there, based on the feedback from the interviews and any further interviews to try to figure out where you'd best fit within Symmetry and what role we can create for you.