Quantitative Researcher

At Toxic Labs, we are building the foundation for global markets with a focus on speed, composability, and security. Our product, Kuru Exchange, is a CLOB DEX built natively on Monad, bringing the speed and capital efficiency of centralized exchanges fully on-chain. The key differentiation: we’re pioneering an EVM-native, fully on-chain order book—unlocking a new standard for trading infrastructure in crypto. Having raised $11.8M in a Series A round led by Paradigm in July 2025, we’re now focused on thoughtfully expanding the team.

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.

• 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

• 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

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

• Familiarity with EVM-compatible chains

• Prior work on fee model design or liquidity incentive structures

• Challenging problems - You’ll work on extremely challenging and unique problems that haven’t existed before.

• Huge opportunity - With Monad’s Parallel EVM, it is possible to build really performant applications that can support mass user adoption in crypto.

• The right team - You’ll be part of a small, exceptional team that wants to make a dent in the universe

• Culture - We’re a lean team working together to achieve very ambitious goals. We are united in our culture of collaboration, low egos, and high-quality outputs. As an early member of our team, you’ll help continue to shape our culture.

• Compensation - You’ll receive a competitive salary and equity package.