Development Internship - Machine Learning Data Engineering, Summer 2023
About Akuna:
Akuna Capital is a young and booming trading firm with a strong focus on cutting-edge technology, data driven decisions and automation. Our core competency is providing liquidity as an options market maker – meaning we provide competitive quotes that we are willing to both buy and sell. To do this successfully we design and implement our own low latency technologies, trading strategies and mathematical models.
Our Founding Partners, including Akuna's CEO Andrew Killion, first conceptualized Akuna in their hometown of Sydney. They opened the firm’s first office in 2011 in the heart of the derivatives industry and the options capital of the world – Chicago. Today, Akuna is proud to operate from additional offices in Sydney, Shanghai, Boston, London and Austin.
What you’ll do as a Development Intern on the Machine Learning Data Engineering team at Akuna:
We are seeking Development Interns to join our innovative and growing technology team for our 10-week internship, Akunacademy, that will take place in our Chicago headquarters. In this role you will work alongside our trading and software team to design and implement elegant solutions to complex and interesting problems.
Development Interns at Akuna have the opportunity to use cutting-edge technology while working on high performance/low latency systems. We offer a team-based approach to trading and software engineering, believing that productive integration of the two groups is vital for success in this industry. Akuna loves Development interns who are self-starters and are able to problem solve and think outside of the box. We value innovation and hard work and want you to make an impact in the firm. Whether you are interested in trading infrastructure, algorithms, exchange gateways, performance engineering, hardware, data capture and analysis, or front-end user interfaces, there’s work to be done. If you are excited to jump in and make a difference, Akuna could be the place for you. In this role you will:
- Work closely with quantitative developers, researchers, and traders in a consultative, problem-solving mode to design and develop curated, Machine Learning data sets, tools, infrastructure and workflows that enable them to answer key research questions and solve problems with data and advanced Machine Learning techniques
- Monitor and validate our data pipelines by building monitoring and analysis tools
- Gain exposure to the financial markets and trading through the development and use of our datasets
- Evaluate and select open source or proprietary tools required to meet our data requirements
Qualities that make great candidates:
- Pursuing a Bachelors, Masters or PhD in technical field – Computer Science/Engineering, Math, Physics, Analytical/Computational Finance or equivalent
- Graduating between August 2023 – August 2024
- Demonstrated experience developing software on Linux using Python and accessing/manipulating data with SQL, Pandas and/or PySpark.
- Exposure to or academic project work utilizing one or more Python Machine Learning frameworks. libraries and/or Machine Learning workflow tools, such as LightGBM, scikit-learn, statsmodels, XGBoost and/or MLFlow
- Ability to communicate complex technical topics in a clear and concise ways
- Passionate, pragmatic problem solver able to independently pursue solutions to complex problems
- Understanding of the core concepts of distributing computing, database design, and data storage
- Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink/Spark/Kafka-Streams, or cloud technologies is a plus
- Legal authorization to work in the U.S. is required on the first day of employment including F-1 students using CPT, OPT or STEM
Please note: If you have applied to multiple roles, you will be asked to complete multiple coding challenges and interviews.