Quantitative Analyst – Execution Research

We have a fantastic new opportunity to join our team at Smartodds as a Execution Research Quantitative Analyst.

Based in North London, Smartodds provides in-depth research and analysis on sporting events around the world, supported by world-class, bespoke software platforms. We are proud of our collaborative and dynamic culture, grounded in our core values of Boldness, Open-mindedness, Ownership, and Togetherness. We are a supportive and collaborative team - our environment is open, inclusive, and focused on doing great work together.

As a member of the Quant Team, you will join an exciting environment predicting outcomes of professional sports on behalf of our clients. We focus on football, baseball, basketball, cricket, tennis, American football, ice hockey, horse racing and golf.

In this role, you will join the execution research team and will be focusing on devising automated betting strategies using our predictive models and algorithms used to market make / seed different bookmakers, market exchanges and predictions markets.

Market making strategies, liquidity, price, risk, order book, counter parties, market trend, trading signal, optimum time of placing bets, will be your topic of research, in the context of both pre‑match and in‑running trading.

As it becomes increasingly important for the business to understand the information provided from clients through their actions, the role might also include analysing betting patterns and market behaviour.

This role combines rigorous statistical and mathematical modelling with production engineering. You will take models from research through to deployment, writing well‑tested, documented code that integrates into our internal libraries. The atmosphere is collaborative and academic - peer reviews, research talks, and further education opportunities - but unlike academia, the market performance provides immediate feedback on model quality. This makes the job challenging but also very exciting.

You will have plenty of autonomy to develop your models from idea to code to validation to (hopefully) release. However, this autonomy operates within a structured framework: established coding patterns, weekly check‑ins, high test coverage, and strict reproducibility standards.

While we are open to applications from anyone who meets the minimum requirements, we would be especially keen to hear from applicants with substantial market making experience and a demonstrable passion for betting markets.

• Contribute to identifying promising research directions; ensure research is carried out to the highest standard
• Develop betting and market making strategies for both pre‑match and in‑play
• Contribute to discussions and efforts to identify weaknesses and potential improvements in existing betting strategies and/or models across all sports
• Support Smartodds’ clients in their pricing tasks by developing, maintaining and supporting the mathematical libraries behind our range of tools, models and software that delivers model predictions into production
• Perform statistical analysis of datasets, testing well‑defined hypotheses and effectively communicating results to various stakeholders
• Potentially support and lead more junior members of the team

• Either MSc in Statistics or a related field (e.g., Data Science or Mathematics), or another field (such as Computer Science, Engineering, Finance, etc) with some experience in statistics and 3+ years of work experience in a relevant role (e.g. sports quantitative analyst for a betting syndicate, a bookmaker or betting exchange); or a PhD or equivalent in Statistics or a related field (e.g., Data Science or Mathematics), or another field (such as Computer Science, Engineering, Finance, etc) with some experience in statistics
• Extensive experience of probabilistic and statistical modelling
• Model diagnostics:
  Ability to evaluate predictive model performance using appropriate metrics, and to quantify and communicate predictive uncertainty
• Strong programming skills in a high‑level language such as R or Python.
• Write production‑quality code, not just analysis scripts
• Demonstrated passion…