Lead Technologist, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and Protocols
Deep Value is extending its expertise in trading and related technologies into cryptocurrencies.
As background, Deep Value builds trading algorithms for U.S. equities, and for some other asset classes. The firm contributes between one to two percent of overall equity trading volume to US stock markets daily, and represented 5.3 per cent of overall US stock market volume in its 2013 daily high. For more on the firm, see farther below.
In its work on bitcoins and cryptocurrencies [CCs] in general, the firm is looking to the following. The distributed ledger underlying the bitcoin protocol, and other developments in CCs represent an explosion of opportunities in finance and banking. The first of these is in moving money around: when internet firms move bits around, even when they do so with encryption, they do so remarkably cheaply. Owing to legacy infrastructure, however, when the international banking and fund transfer systems move bits around, and when those bits represents money, those movements costs world economies upwards of a half-trillion dollars yearly, by some estimates. CCs present a network over which fund transfers can be done securely and essentially for free — their decentralized nature spreads costs across many nodes that constitute the network, reducing costs dramatically. This represent the immediate class of opportunities. While this is itself disruptive and has indeed given rise a full ecosystem around bitcoin there are still other disruptions, in areas typically referred to as smart contracts and smart property that are just becoming visible on the horizon.
Role and Prerequisites
Deep Value is looking for a Developer experienced in Java or python to work on its cryptocurrency efforts.
You will be part of a close-knit team of superlative developers that will work directly with the CEO of Deep Value to advance its CC projects — involving money transfers, trading strategies and others.
More on Deep Value
Deep Value builds trading algorithms for U.S. equities, and for some other asset classes. The firm contributes between one to two percent of overall equity trading volume to US stock markets daily; represented 5.3 per cent of overall US stock market volume in its 2013 daily high; and over 2013 the firm traded more than a half-trillion dollars of US equities, an amount that exceeded the 2013 GDP of Sweden. The company's world-class technology solution and platform is installed on-site at client locations as well as at co-located datacenters. Clients include prominent hedge funds and other prestigious financial services powerhouses. Deep Value is the dominant Exchange-sponsored provider of algorithms to all brokers on the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Deep Value has developed its own distributed, fault-tolerant trading platform on top of industry standard open source components. This trading platform can also be run in a cluster based simulation framework allowing Deep Value's research organization to bring to bear large clusters of machines to run sophisticated analysis aimed at improving performance.
Essential Functions
1. Designing and implementing products and protocols on the bitcoin blockchain to enable smart transactions.
2. Debugging and proposing fixes for complex distributed interactions that may have run into problems
3. Engaging with the open-source community via github, soliciting use, inputs and examination of security vulnerabilities.
4. Engaging with security experts and advisors to address, to have security by design and, at subsequent levels, addressing outcomes from security audits.
5. Building simple web front ends to enable user interaction.
Desired Qualifications
1. Computer Science degree from a top university
2. 5+ years experience in core Java or Python
3. Understanding of standard applied cryptographic primitives, including those underlying the bitcoin protocol.
4. At least one class in applied cryptography at the undergrad level, and be familiar with the primitives of modern cryptography like cryptographic hash functions, public key encryption, digital signatures etc.
5. You'll need to have read the celebrated bitcoin paper [1].
6. You will need to have understood what Namecoin, Colored Coins, Ethereum and Mastercoin are setting out to do, not so much at the business level, as how, at the level of the protocols they are implementing, they aim to achieve business objectives.
7. Passion for writing clean, re-usable software
[1] Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system." Consulted 1 (2008): 2012. [Sections 1 through 10.]
What does Deep Value do as a company ?
Deep Value primarily builds execution and high frequency trading strategies and the platform to deploy these strategies on.
Execution strategies are in-house developed ways of trading large client orders (e.g. buy 100,000 shares on IBM before 4pm today) so that the act of trading this order does not cause our clients to pay to high a price for this execution. As typically the size of order is such that it is not possible to fully complete the order directly, we need to perform inter-temporal optimization which essentially means spreading this order out through time. We use sophisticated statistical techniques as well as trading heuristics to achieve this optimization. We have a full research team that we work with to develop these algorithms.
High frequency strategies look to deploy high performance code (in terms of through-put and latency) to take advantage of specific market structure effects to trade in and out of the market continuously to look to generate profits. As such we are highly focused on the performance our our systems and hardware deployment.
Deep Value is committed to building out our trading platform and the strategies deployed on that platform, with the aim of being the performance and volume leader in the US algorithmic trading space. We believe our advantage of a sophisticated trading platform and deep understanding of the US equity markets will allow us to continue to be substantial players in the US execution space.
Are the work hours unusual?
As we interact with US-based persons, it should be noted that developers are expected to work till 1 p.m. New York time.
Interested candidates please forward your updated profiles to
jobs@deepvalue.net 
