Data Engineer - Quantitative Data Acquisition

The Opportunity

We're looking for a data-minded, resourceful engineer to join Sovereign, a quantitative trading desk at Nascent. In this role, you'll help us uncover, evaluate, and integrate new data sources to fuel our research and trading strategies. You’ll work in a fast-moving, exploratory environment where no two days are the same: developing pipelines, analyzing diverse datasets, and building scalable workflows that support quantitative discovery at scale.

You’ll thrive here if you’re energized by the unknown, deeply curious about data, and excited to be part of a highly collaborative team that spans trading, engineering, and research. The ideal candidate is self-driven, pragmatic, and sharp at identifying signal in noisy environments. You could be perfect for the role if you love to bring a blend of creative problem-solving and systems thinking, and find satisfaction in transforming raw data into impactful insights.

• Proactively identify and evaluate novel data sources that could drive alpha, collaborating with traders and researchers to prioritize exploration based on signal potential
• Conduct exploratory analysis on new datasets, rapidly building intuition for structure, anomalies, and usability
• Acquire historical datasets and build automated pipelines to ensure freshness, reliability, and scalability over time
• Standardize disparate datasets into coherent schemas to support seamless downstream research and modeling
• Design and implement custom AI agents and other LLM-based tools to create reusable workflows for dataset evaluation, ingestion, and transformation
• Partner cross-functionally with engineers, quants, and business leads to develop a shared understanding of data needs and surface high-impact opportunities
• Develop strong intuitions around the structure and quality of datasets, quickly identifying gaps, inconsistencies, or anomalies that impact downstream use.
• Proactively surface opportunities where data can unlock insights, drive decision-making, or create edge—turning ambiguous business problems into actionable data work.

• You thrive in ambiguity and  less-structured environments and feel comfortable building structure and executing your own plans.
• You get energy from both starting new projects and optimizing/maintaining what you’ve built as well as working closely with interdisciplinary teams.
• You’re naturally curious and can independently deep-dive into unfamiliar tools or topics.

• Strong track record working with analytical environments like Pandas, Polars, R, Matlab, or Julia, with the ability to move quickly from prototype to production
• Proficient in Python and SQL, with experience building tools that streamline data access and exploration
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants and LLMs (e.g. Copilot, ChatGPT) to accelerate analysis and automation
• Experience working with time series data and an intuitive grasp of its quirks, challenges, and patterns
• Exposure to complex systems such as rules engines, risk infrastructure, or search platforms, and a pragmatic mindset for building in those environments
• Familiarity with tools like Docker, Linux CLI, or observability workflows (e.g. logs, memory profiling)
• Background in a quantitative or data-rich domain such as crypto, finance, AdTech, or gaming
• Bonus points for shipping a product or side project, contributing to open source, or building internal tools with tangible impact

About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We've made venture investments in 100+ early-stage teams that we believe have the potential to create substantive change, expand boundaries, and find new horizons. We are consistently on the hunt for the most competitive and curious minds exploring the edges of the crypto ecosystem and leverage our hyper flexible structure to accelerate ideas into fully deployed strategies.

Our Team & Culture

At Nascent, we are an interdisciplinary team of investors, builders & creators, capable of achieving more together than we can as individuals. We offer the opportunity to contribute to building the future global economic system with a world-class team and culture that pairs the freedom to explore, experiment & play with a competitive drive to win. We invest in our people by providing the autonomy to build, coupled with accountability & honest feedback to help learn, grow, perform & win. Our distributed team understands the value of in-person time—we encourage team members to come together for more frequent in-person work. 

Principles that drive our team & work

• Compete to win
• Explore, experiment, play
• Always be building
• Seek and speak truth
• Own your shit.

What We Offer

At Nascent, we offer a competitive total compensation package heavily weighted toward bonus, ensuring that when we perform at our best and the firm wins we all win. 

• The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
• Remote and distributed working environment with opportunities for in-person collaboration
• Comprehensive health benefits package including dental, vision, and life
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave & supported return to work
• Home office setup and stipend or coworking space and wellness stipend
• Retirement plan matching contributions 
• Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
• Team activities and in-person team retreats 

We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity and differences of perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status, inclusive of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.