Market Data Specialist

As a Market Data Specialist at Vatic Labs, you will be the firm’s central steward of third-party data, overseeing the sourcing, ingestion, vendor management, and long-term strategy for both market and alternative data. Your role will bridge business, legal, and technical domains—supporting quantitative research, trading, and infrastructure teams by ensuring reliable, high-performance, and compliant data access.

Responsibilities

Data Sourcing & Vendor Strategy

• Lead relationships and contract negotiations with exchanges, brokers, and data vendors (e.g., OPRA, ITCH, FIX, Level 1/2 feeds).
• Evaluate and acquire low-latency market feeds based on latency, determinism, coverage, and cost.
• Manage subscription models, entitlements, usage tracking, and compliance with licensing terms.
• Identify, vet, and onboard alternative datasets with alpha potential.
• Partner with researchers and PMs to test and evaluate signal-generating datasets.
• Lead diligence on quality, update frequency, and legal/commercial terms.
• Strategy & Roadmap:
• Define and evolve the firm’s multi-quarter data acquisition roadmap.
• Proactively identify coverage gaps, latency blind spots, or vendor overexposure.
• Track industry trends and anticipate future data opportunities or vendor shifts.

Data Ingestion & Technical Coordination

• Define ingestion specs (latency thresholds, schema formats, QA checks).
• Coordinate onboarding and delivery specifications with engineering teams.
• Ensure production-readiness, validation logic, and ingestion health across datasets.
• Monitor ingestion SLAs and ensure vendor-delivered data meets internal standards.

Vendor Lifecycle Management

• Own the firm-wide inventory of vendor contracts, pricing, technical specifications, and contact details.
• Develop processes for vendor onboarding, monitoring, performance evaluation, and offboarding.
• Lead SLA tracking (uptime, latency, data quality), coordinate issue resolution, and audit readiness.
• Track dataset impact, usage metrics, redundancy, and ROI across the data portfolio.

Infrastructure & Warehouse Optimization

• Collaborate with engineers to build scalable, low-latency pipelines for historical and real-time data.
• Support cataloging, cleansing, transformation, and persistent storage workflows.
• Champion data hygiene, patching, and anomaly detection processes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• With Technology: Define specs, support ingestion, ensure QA thresholds.
• With Research: Prioritize discovery, format usability, and delivery timing.
• With Legal/Compliance: Manage licenses, redistribution rights, audit preparation.
• With Infrastructure Teams: Monitor latency and readiness of feeds in production.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of experience in high-frequency trading, quant research, or data-driven investing.
• Deep expertise in market data (order books, quotes, trades) and alternative data.
• Familiarity with vendor lifecycle management, contract negotiation, and usage compliance.
• Technically fluent (Python, SQL, JSON, ITCH, FIX, CSV); comfortable discussing pipelines and validation specs.
• Strong operational rigor and cross-functional communication skills.
• Experience with Bloomberg, Refinitiv, or direct exchange feeds a plus.

Why Vatic?

At Vatic, we’re serious about our work—but we also believe in balance, growth, and having fun along the way. Here’s what you can expect:

• Flat structure with direct executive exposure – Work closely with leadership and make an impact from day one.
• Comprehensive health benefits – Full health insurance coverage for employees and dependents.
• Daily meals provided – Enjoy free breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office.
• Gym membership – Stay healthy with a gym reimbursement, in addition to our onsite gym. 
• Unlimited office snacks – Fuel your day with your favorite snacks, always stocked.
• Fun team outings – Build camaraderie and unwind with regular events.
• Organized poker, ping pong, and game nights – We’re a competitive group that enjoys getting together to challenge one another. 

The base salary range for this role is between $150,000 and $275,000. The base salary range does not include any other form of compensation, such as any bonus amounts, or any benefits.  Factors that may impact the agreed upon base salary within the range for a particular candidate include years of experience, level of education obtained, skill set, and other factors.