Quantitative Researcher

At Toxic Flow Labs, we are building the foundation for global markets with a focus on speed, composability, and security. Our flagship product, Kuru Exchange, is a CLOB DEX built natively on Monad, bringing the speed and capital efficiency of centralized exchanges on-chain. Our key differentiation is an EVM-native, fully on-chain order book that unlocks a new standard for trading infrastructure in crypto.

We’ve raised a total of $13.8M, led by Paradigm and Electric Capital, and are now focused on building a world-class team.

About The Role

We’re looking for a Quantitative Researcher with experience building trading systems and a strong understanding of market structure. Reporting to the Co-Founder, you’ll help scale the exchange across volume, liquidity, and active traders—while enabling participants to run their own strategies seamlessly. The focus is on making the platform highly attractive to market makers, and continuously refining the design to improve execution quality, deepen liquidity, and drive sustainable trading activity.

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and run trading strategies on KuruAnalyze exchange data to identify friction points and propose concrete improvements to the protocol, fee structures, order book mechanics, and overall trading experience

• Work directly with external traders, market makers, and protocols integrating into Kuru — helping them understand the system and get up and running

• Collaborate with the core team to stress-test ideas through simulation and backtesting before proposing them

What We’re Looking For

• Hands-on experience running live trading strategies — crypto-native preferred, but strong TradFi market microstructure experience works too

• Familiarity with on-chain data (order book analytics, chain data, etc.)

• Intuition for market microstructure — you think about spreads, latency, adverse selection, and liquidity depth naturally

• Ability to communicate clearly: with protocol engineers, external traders, and non-technical stakeholders alike

• Genuine curiosity about DeFi

Nice to Have

• Experience with CLOB-based venues (CEX or DEX)

• Familiarity with EVM-compatible chains

• Prior work on fee model design or liquidity incentive structures

Why work with us?

• Challenging problems
  You’ll work on difficult, novel problems at the intersection of exchange design, low-latency systems, smart contracts, and crypto market structure. Many of these problems simply haven’t existed in this form before.

• Build from first principles
  We are pioneering an EVM-native, fully on-chain order book. You’ll have the opportunity to help define how this category of trading infrastructure is built, rather than simply improving on an established playbook.

• Huge opportunity
  Monad’s Parallel EVM makes it possible to build high-performance applications that were previously impractical on the EVM. Kuru is using that performance to bring a CEX-like trading experience and capital efficiency on a decentralised blockchain.

• High ownership, exceptional team
  We’re a small team, so your work will have a direct and visible impact on the product, architecture, and company. You’ll work alongside highly driven people who care deeply about quality, move quickly, and keep egos low.

• Culture and compensation
  We’re a lean, collaborative team working toward ambitious goals. As an early member, you’ll help shape how we work and what we build. You’ll also receive a competitive salary and equity package.