Associate Director, Risk (UK)

About us

26 Degrees is a specialist multi-asset prime broker headquartered in Sydney with offices in London, Cyprus and Tokyo. The company specialises in providing prime services to brokers, hedge funds and proprietary trading firms. We are constantly in search of high-performance individuals to join the team and make significant contributions to the success of our company and our clients.

Why join us

• Remuneration - 26 Degrees offers a highly competitive base salary along with Short Term Incentive Schemes.
• Flexibility - We want to hire the best talent in the industry. To attract the best, we have embraced a flexible work culture.
• Career development - We do not just want to hire the best talent; we want to train them to be even better. Career development is a priority to you – so it is a priority for us.
• Young, Compact, High-performance Team – 26 Degrees has a global headcount of over 80 employees, but the London division that you will join is a small specialist team of 5 colleagues, working closely together to support our group brand and presence in UK & Europe.

About the role

As a Senior Risk Management Analyst, you will be working closely with the sales, trading, and operations teams. Your main focus will be ongoing monitoring of market risk across the entire order book: FX, indices, equities, and commodities along with counter-party risk review. This includes review of trade flow, tracking market exposure, ensuring consistency of pricing, and monitoring the trade book. An ideal candidate will have a trading or risk management background and will be able to identify strategies based on trade history and other quantitative analytics. Understanding of market microstructures as well as overall macroeconomic trends will also be helpful. Some middle or back-office experience at a trading firm, bank, or other financial institution with experience working with a trade or position-based level of granularity (e.g. position/ cash reconciliations, corporate actions) is a definite plus. Experience with trade systems will be important in order to maintain bespoke product offerings and commercial terms for end traders. Ideally, you will have worked with FX, futures, and equities in the past and have a strong quantitative background, including working with SQL and/or Python. In addition, the candidate will have experience in all aspects of the Financial Services industry such as analysis of order books, market and credit risk monitoring, trade processing, and/or market data. The desired candidate will have a willingness to work primarily EU/US hours.

Key duties and responsibilities

• Conduct risk reviews when onboarding new clients: review client financials, news events, counter-party risk due-diligence. Assign appropriate level of margins for all asset classes and set risk limits. Liaise with sales, dealing, legal & compliance and other internal teams as necessary.
• Monitor client free equity, margin usage, NOP levels, and liquidity ratios. Monitor compliance with market risk limits set out to various counterparties and ensure proper escalation procedures in case of breach.
• Monitor proprietary system of trade-based alerts and escalate as necessary.
• Reconcile prime broker and margin liquidity providers' positions versus in-house positions.
• Reconcile account cash balances to system P&L.
• Provide daily review and explanation of the positions, P&L, and risk profile of the trading book to senior management.
• Calculate Value-at-Risk, perform Stress Test for client accounts across asset classes. Review and report results and recommendations to Chief Risk Officer.
• Contribute to Risk management projects and initiatives regarding portfolio margining, tiered margining, improving risk metrics for on-boarding due-diligence, counterparty risk evaluation, among other key initiatives of the Risk department.
• Analyze technological risk exposures and provide recommendations to improve internal controls related to IT systems/platforms. This includes reviews of vendor platforms, S/W and H/W releases, APIs, etc. in addition to reviewing internal Change Releases.
• Review firm-wide operational incidents, their root causes, and evaluate sufficiency of remediation measures.
• Liaise with colleagues globally to ensure smooth handover and synchronization of teams.

The above list is not exhaustive, and the role may change to meet the evolving objectives of the company.

About you

• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in economics, computer science, mathematics or similar.
• Disciplined self-starter with ability to make well-balanced decisions and solve problems under pressure.
• 2-5 years' work experience in trading-related area, ideally in risk management, middle or back office
• Sound understanding of Risk concepts (market, and credit risk, operational risk) and risk metrics (liquidity, volatility, concentration risks, etc).
• Affinity towards numbers. Advanced or Intermediate Microsoft Excel skills.
• Experience with trading systems on a technical level. Proficiency in Excel and SQL (R/ Python a plus).
• Good communication skills and the confidence to professionally challenge other’s ideas and opinions
• Experience in or practical understanding of platforms such as IRESS, One Zero or equivalent is highly desired.