USD 7+ billion alternative asset management company with around 250 people across multiple time zones and locations
Hong Kong 
201 - 500 EMPLOYEES
EST. 20147bn+ Asset Mgmt Company
At Symmetry Investments, we seek to engage in intelligent risk-taking to create value for our clients, partners and employees.
We derive our edge from our capacity to generate Win-Wins – in the broadest sense. Win-Win is our fundamental ethical and strategic principle. By generating Win-Wins, we can create unique solutions that reconcile perspectives that are usually seen as incompatible or opposites, and encompass the best that each side has to offer.
We integrate fixed-income arbitrage with global macro strategies in a novel way. We invent and develop technology that focuses on the potential of human-machine integration. We build systems where machines do what they do best, supporting people to do what people do best.
We are creating a collaborative meritocracy: a culture where individual contribution serves both personal and collective goals - and is rewarded accordingly. We value both ownership thinking AND cooperative team spirit, self-realization AND community.
Symmetry is a global investment company with offices in Hong Kong and London. We have been in business since 2014 after successfully spinning off from a major New York-based hedge fund.
Qualities and traits we value
- Courage and daring
- Phronesis (practical wisdom), common sense and commercial orientation
- Practical people who are at the same time unreasonable when they ought to be
- Highly individual people oriented to promoting survival and flourishing of the group
- Inclination and ability to notice and understand links between seemingly-unrelated things
- Curiosity
- Extreme motivation
- Mechanical sympathy
- Extreme and unusual intellectual capabilities
- A love of tinkering
- Resourcefulness
- Good taste and love of beauty
About Us
Symmetry Investments is a post startup USD 9+ billion alternative asset management company with around 250 people across multiple time zones and locations.
Our core technology team has been remote-first for some time, and the whole company is following suit, accelerated by the pandemic.
I'm co-CEO and co-COO, responsible amongst other things for technology across the firm and I’m posting this myself. That should give you an idea both about how seriously we take technology and the culture of the firm.
We are five years into a period of transformation from what was initially a fairly standard enterprise finance technology approach to something new that recognises the importance of both the humane and the technical for discretionary portfolio management and for the business of running an alternative investment manager. Amaury Sechet, Andrei Alexandrescu and Atila Neves have been working with us as long-term consultants and we have many other talented people with lower public profiles.
It's not easy to integrate practitioners who may spend most of their day programming, but are oriented towards solving business problems, with developers who are specialists in programming. To achieve this, we wrote a little functional DSL that's now in production. Type inference of returns and parameters using inequality constraints is in a feature branch and there is plenty more to do on the language itself as well as the ecosystem around it. SIL can compile and call C++, D, and C# at runtime and interoperate with Python and R. What might be a project in itself elsewhere can be just a set of functions in Symmetry Integration Language.
The language is written in D and we have a close involvement with the D Foundation and community, hosting DConf in London. So we are looking for outstanding native code developers who would like to write D as well as people to work with practitioners writing Symmetry Integration Language. Also looking for people to write documentation and work on the build.
It's quite a creative place where we encourage a degree of courage amidst practical constraints, and we are open to doing things a different way if it's commercially sound and in the interests of our investors.
We look for virtues and capabilities over only experience and credentials although those things aren't a disadvantage. Do not let a lack of credentials or qualifications prevent you from applying. We've recently hired experts with C++, Common Lisp, D, Haxe, Haskell, Julia and Perl backgrounds, and are happy to bring them up to speed with the tools we use.
Compensation is currently not quite at Netflix standards but is generous to very generous over time by broad technology industry standards. We recognise and reward technical accomplishment and have a very flat structure - don't be surprised if our founder and Chief Investment Officer starts asking you questions about your work.
Symmetry Talks
- Presenting SIL-cling to Compiler Research Group at Princeton (https://youtu.be/7teqrCNzrD8)
- Symmetry Internship Project - calling C++ from SIL (http://dconf.org/2020/online/index.html#alexandru)
- All Spreadsheets Must Die (https://youtu.be/FZi9CSB9_kk)
- Lessons from a DSL where all you have is Ranges (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtuzSlKRmzA)
- Alternative Investment Management (https://youtu.be/1rMq-4rWgis)
Links
- Symmetry GitHub (https://github.com/symmetryinvestments)
Languages
- Dlang (D)
- Typescript
- Kotlin
- we do not use but value experience in modern C++, beautiful C, Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Elm
Team Structure
Currently we have about 100 full time employees and manage approximately US$4.2 billion of capital.