Chief Risk Officer - AlgoQuant Asset Management
Reporting Into: CEO
Preferred Locations: Dubai preferred
About AlgoQuant Asset Management
At AlgoQuant, we're building the future of digital asset management, grounded in rigorous research, world-class technology, and a relentless focus on performance.
We began as a proprietary trading firm, developing sophisticated algorithmic strategies and operating in some of the most complex and fast-moving markets. That DNA remains at our core, but today we are evolving into a fully remote, globally distributed investment management business. This transformation reflects a broader ambition: to scale our edge, deliver institutional-grade results, and set new standards for the industry.
Our quantitative environment is built to empower innovation, combining vast data capabilities, disciplined model development, and highly automated execution. Risk is embedded in every layer of our thinking, with robust measurement, control, and scenario analysis integrated into our systems and decision-making. Technology is not just a tool for us, it’s a core competency and a competitive advantage.
Role Overview
We are seeking a Chief Risk Officer (CRO) to lead and unify our firmwide approach to risk management across all trading and investment activity. This role sits at the intersection of quantitative strategy oversight, portfolio risk, model governance, operational resilience, and firmwide risk controls. The CRO will own the design and implementation of a holistic risk framework, ensure rigorous model validation across all internally developed and externally sourced strategies, and maintain robust liquidity, counterparty, and operational risk management. The role is deeply technical and requires a mindset of professional paranoia to ensure the firm's systems, models, infrastructure, and trading practices remain resilient, secure, and fully aligned with institutional standards.
Key Responsibilities
Portfolio Risk Management
- Build and lead a comprehensive portfolio risk framework across multiple strategies and counterparties, including internal and external trading teams.
- Define and enforce risk limits at the strategy, team, and firm level, including factor exposures, leverage, drawdown, volatility, tail risk, and liquidity.
- Develop and maintain real-time and batch risk dashboards and reports for the CIO, COO, and senior stakeholders.
- Implement tools to assess strategy diversification, concentration, and correlations, both ex-ante and ex-post, enabling more effective portfolio construction.
- Conduct pre-trade and post-trade risk analysis to ensure alignment with approved risk parameters.
- Monitor and stress test the portfolio under extreme, adversarial, and tail-event scenarios.
- Ensure all position monitoring, exposure tracking, and risk limit checks are fully automated, including real-time alerting for breaches and anomalies.
- Oversee the design, testing, and governance of auto-liquidation systems to ensure positions are safely reduced or closed under predefined risk conditions without manual intervention.
- Maintain firmwide visibility into automated risk controls, ensuring fail-safes, redundancy, and continuous monitoring across all venues and strategies.
Independent Model Validation
- Establish and lead a rigorous independent model validation (IMV) function covering all systematic models, signals, execution algorithms, portfolio construction engines, and risk models.
- Validate model assumptions, data quality, statistical robustness, and sensitivity to market regime shifts.
- Assess model risk, including overfitting, instability, dependency on fragile data sources, and susceptibility to manipulation or adversarial market behaviour.
- Review code, documentation, methodology, and implementation for all models to ensure alignment between research intent and production behaviour.
- Maintain a model inventory, approval workflow, and periodic review cycle.
- Collaborate closely with engineering and research to ensure validated models maintain fidelity and do not drift after deployment.
Treasury and Liquidity Management
- Support the treasury function, including cash, stablecoin, and token management across centralized and decentralized venues.
- Support in the development of tools and processes to monitor short-term and long-term liquidity, collateral, and margin usage across exchanges, custodians, and prime brokers.
- Optimize capital deployment across venues and strategies to minimize idle capital while preserving adequate reserves for risk mitigation and trading flexibility.
- Lead analysis and execution of balance sheet hedging strategies (e.g., delta-neutrality, FX hedging, duration management).
Risk Governance and Controls
- Serve as the central authority for firmwide risk governance, working closely with Compliance, Operations, and Enterprise Technology to enforce best practices.
- Lead counterparty and venue risk assessments, including stress testing, credit exposure analysis, and ongoing monitoring.
- Support regulatory and investor due diligence processes with transparent risk documentation and metrics.
- Collaborate with engineering to integrate risk data pipelines, alerting systems, and real-time monitoring tools.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in risk management, portfolio construction, or capital allocation within a multi-strat hedge fund, or proprietary trading firm.
- Deep understanding of quantitative trading strategies across asset classes, ideally with hands-on exposure to digital assets and systematic strategies.
- Proven track record building risk frameworks, analytics, and processes from the ground up in a fast-moving environment.
- Strong command of portfolio theory, factor models, risk-adjusted performance metrics, and capital efficiency principles.
- Experience with on-chain and off-chain digital asset infrastructure, including exchanges, custodians, wallets, and DeFi protocols, is a strong plus.
- Highly collaborative with excellent communication skills, able to partner with CIO, CTO, traders, engineers, and external managers.
- Fluency in Python or another programming language for data analysis is preferred.
Why Join AlgoQuant?
- Join a high performance digital asset hedge fund at a stage of significant institutional expansion.
- Lead one of the most important operational functions in the firm with direct influence over strategy, product scalability, and operational excellence.
- Support the launch and maintenance of innovative digital asset products including BTC denominated instruments.
- Work with world class quantitative researchers, traders, and engineers in a fully remote, globally distributed environment.
- Play a key role in shaping the operational foundation of a cutting edge digital asset investment manager with strong momentum and ambitious growth plans.
