Quantitative Analyst Intern - Digital Assets Market Making (HFT)

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

Since 2017, Keyrock has been a change-maker in digital assets. We're a global, remote-first team of 200+ people across 40+ nationalities, with hubs in Brussels, London, Paris and New York.

We provide liquidity across 80+ centralized and decentralized exchanges - a position cemented by our Series C, led by SC Ventures. Today we run a full spectrum of capital markets businesses across centralized and on-chain venues: market making, high-frequency trading, options, OTC, DeFi trading desks, advisory, and asset management.

We're building toward the agentic investment banking capabilities for the era of digital finance. A proprietary agentic layer runs the mechanics of the market, so our people can focus on the work code cannot do: the deal, the relationship, and the judgement.

We're not just envisioning the future of finance - we're building it.

Our internship programme gives early-career talent the opportunity to build practical skills, contribute to meaningful projects and learn alongside experienced colleagues in digital finance.

Typically lasting six months and based in our Brussels office (London possible), each internship includes hands-on experience, clear learning goals and dedicated guidance and regular feedback. We look for curiosity, relevant foundational skills, deep, active interest and passion for digital assets and the potential to grow exponentially with us - you don’t need to arrive with all the answers. Where performance, business needs and available opportunities align, an internship may lead to a permanent role, though this is not guaranteed.

We are looking for 3-4 high-caliber Quantitative Analyst Interns to sit within our Strategic Market Making (CeFi and DeFi), Credit and Corporate Development desks/teams (see other openings on our career page for details).

Application deadline: 30 November 2026
Start date: 1 March 2027

Selection process:

• Interview with Talent Acquisition representative

• Interview with Hiring Manager

• Recruitment Challenge

The role
About Strategic Market Making Desk
Our Strategic Proprietary Market Making team researches and deploys systematic trading strategies across centralized digital asset venues. We study how order-book dynamics, fragmented liquidity, exchange design and participant behaviour shape pricing, execution and risk.
As a Quantitative Analyst Intern within the HFT track, 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. You will investigate how fair value, liquidity, latency, queue position, fees and adverse selection affect real-world execution across venues.

This is a technical and applied internship. We are looking for someone who combines strong quantitative reasoning and coding skills with a detailed understanding of electronic markets. You should be curious about how exchanges work beneath the interface and able to connect market microstructure to trading outcomes.

Key Responsibilities - Quantitative Analyst (HFT)

• Analyse multi-venue top-of-book and depth data, trades, orders, fills and cancels to study liquidity, price discovery and execution quality.

• Build and validate latency-aware, event-driven backtests with explicit assumptions around maker/taker execution, queue position, fill probability, fees and cancellations.

• Measure spread capture, forward markouts, fees and adverse selection, and investigate how execution quality changes across venues, instruments and market regimes.

• Build reusable Python tools and data pipelines using modern columnar analysis and SQL for strategy research, performance attribution and monitoring.

• Study cross-venue price discovery, lead–lag relationships, fair-value construction and spot–perpetual basis while accounting for data staleness, instrument design and settlement-currency differences.

• Support live strategies through PnL, inventory and exposure analysis, post-trade review and investigation of unexpected performance.

• Evaluate liquidity-program economics by balancing execution quality, market share, fees and incentives, and work with traders and engineers to translate research into robust production improvements.

• Present findings clearly, including assumptions, limitations, risks and recommended next steps.

• Quantitative and coding foundations: You are pursuing or recently completed a degree in mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics, quantitative finance or a related field. You are proficient in Python for data analysis, ideally including Polars or similar columnar tools, and comfortable with SQL, Git and command-line workflows. Experience with ClickHouse or another analytical database is valuable.

• Electronic market structure: You understand limit order books, order types, maker/taker mechanics, matching and priority rules, spreads, market depth and how trades move prices.

• Execution awareness: You 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.

• Digital asset markets: You understand key differences between spot and perpetual futures, including basis, funding, leverage, liquidation risk, settlement currencies and residual exposure.

• Quantitative reasoning: You are comfortable with probability, statistics, time-series analysis and evaluating noisy results without overstating significance.

• Hands-on curiosity: Ideally, you have built or analysed something yourself—such as an order-book study, trading bot, exchange connector, backtest, execution simulator or market-data pipeline.

• Trading judgement: You naturally question whether an apparent edge survives latency, fees, market impact, changing liquidity and real execution constraints.

• Ownership and communication: You can structure an ambiguous problem, test assumptions and communicate findings and limitations clearly in English.

Nice to Have

• 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

Our offer

• A 6 month paid internship at world-renowned digital assets company with accommodation provided for entirety or part of it

• The opportunity to learn about digital assets and blockchain from a 30,000 ft view of the entire ecosystem

• Working from one of Brussels newest, nicest and most advanced office spaces

• A global, collaborative and tech-driven environment.

• Autonomy & Impact - our flat structure means you can contribute your ideas from day one and help shape the foundation that will power Keyrock’s future business.

• Culture of Excellence - we value nimbleness, drive for success, owner mentality and collaboration.

• Opportunity to leave your mark and start your career in one of the most reputable companies in the digital assets world

• We are envisioning for the internship to be based pre-dominantly in Brussels. It is possible for a selected candidate to be based in London, UK, provided at least 1-2 months onboarding period would be spent in Brussels together with the rest of the interns cohort.

Our recruitment philosophy

We value self-awareness and powerful communication skills in our recruitment process. We seek fiercely passionate people who understand themselves and their career goals. We're after those with the right skills and a conscious choice to join our field. The perfect fit? A crypto enthusiast who’s driven, collaborative, acts with ownership and delivers solid, scalable outcomes.

As an employer we are committed to building a positive and collaborative work environment. We welcome employees of all backgrounds, and hire, reward and promote entirely based on merit and performance.

Due to the nature of our business and external requirements, we perform background checks on all potential employees, passing which is a prerequisite to join Keyrock.

https://keyrock.com/careers/