School of Accounting and Finance
Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Associate
(Ref. 260511010)
(1) Postdoctoral Fellow (two posts)
(2) Research Associate (two posts)
[Appointment period: each for twelve months]
Duties
The appointees will assist the project leader in the research project – “Quant cloud centre for AI in accounting and finance”.
For the appointed Postdoctoral Fellow (AI Financial Algorithm Engineer), he/she will be required to:
(a) design high-quality financial instruction datasets, inject financial market forecasting capabilities through context engineering and post-training, and build a reward model system for financial event analysis and logical reasoning to enhance the model’s capabilities in financial text analysis, market forecasting, and risk warning;
(b) participate in optimising model training and inference processes to improve the accuracy, recall rate, and real-time response performance of large language models in financial market forecasting scenarios; and
(c) track frontier technologies, open-source projects, and SOTA models in financial-domain model post-training, and conduct technical validation and implementation.
For the appointed Postdoctoral Fellow (Senior Quantitative Researcher), he/she will be required to:
(a) participate in the design of quantitative strategies and algorithm development based on large models, build high-frequency quantitative strategy frameworks based on project R&D results;
(b) participate in debugging and reviewing the business logic, rationality, and effectiveness of project data processing, model training, and agent construction, test the computational accuracy and business logic applicability of the backtesting engine and simulated trading platform; and
(c) track frontier technologies, open-source projects, and SOTA models in AI + financial quantitative models, and conduct technical validation and implementation.
For the appointed Research Associate (Multimodal Algorithm Engineer), he/she will be required to:
(a) be responsible for collecting multi-source heterogeneous data in financial scenarios, including text, speech, and video, conducting event extraction, sentiment analysis, and entity linking, building high-quality corpus databases, and developing multimodal alignment and integration solutions to support the usability and generalisation of large models in financial analysis scenarios;
(b) build an end-to-end fundamental toolchain covering data processing, training, evaluation, service deployment, and monitoring, establish data standards, automated evaluation metrics, and regression test sets to support the continuous iteration of model capabilities; and
(c) track frontier technologies, open-source projects, and SOTA models in multimodal processing, and conduct technical validation and implementation.
For the appointed Research Associate (AI Agent Development Engineer), he/she will be required to:
(a) lead the architecture design of trading agents based on reinforcement learning and large language models, build an end-to-end framework covering perception, planning, and execution, including market state understanding, trading decision generation, order execution, and risk management;
(b) build and continuously optimise model training and inference processes, work closely with quantitative researchers to conduct backtesting analysis and simulated trading for agents, and continuously iterate and optimise agent performance; and
(c) track frontier technologies, open-source projects, and SOTA models in financial-domain model post-training, and conduct technical validation and implementation.
Qualifications
For the posts of Postdoctoral Fellow, applicants should have a doctoral degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics or related fields, or an equivalent qualification and must have no more than five years of post-qualification experience at the time of application.
For the appointed Postdoctoral Fellow (AI Financial Algorithm Engineer), applicants should also have solid foundation in algorithms, computer science and machine learning; familiar with frontier AI technologies and open-source projects, with excellent programming and engineering capabilities. Preference will be given to those with:
(a) published papers at high-level academic conferences or have competition experience;
(b) project experience in model fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and context engineering, successful experience in building complex reward models; and
(c) experience in financial investment or quantitative strategy research.
For the appointed Postdoctoral Fellow (Senior Quantitative Researcher), applicants should also:
(a) have solid foundation in statistical analysis and AI algorithms, with excellent programming and engineering capabilities, strong knowledge of quantitative business practices and familiar with frontier AI technologies;
(b) have experience in developing high-frequency trading strategies for Hong Kong and U.S. stocks or futures, as well as live trading operations; and
(c) be proficient in C/C++ or Python, with excellent programming skills.
For the posts of Research Associate, applicants should have a master’s degree or a good honours degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics or related fields with at least three years of research/relevant work experience.
For the appointed Research Associate (Multimodal Algorithm Engineer), applicants should also:
(a) have solid web crawling skills and strong large-scale data processing capabilities, be familiar with SQL and common databases such as MySQL and Redis, vector databases such as Faiss, and commonly used big data processing frameworks; and
(b) strong capability in unified modeling and efficient representation learning for multimodal data, with the ability to improve model generalisation and robustness in vertical-domain tasks,
(c) be familiar with mainstream LLM technology stacks, understand Transformer, Tokenizer, and the fundamentals of preference alignment; and
(d) have solid foundation in computer science and machine learning with excellent programming and engineering capabilities.
Preference will be given to those:
(a) with practical project experience and proven results in unified modeling and efficient representative learning for multimodal data and to improve model generalization and robustness in vertical domain tasks;
(b) with practical experience in model post-training and deployment inference projects;
(c) with experience in financial investment or quantitative strategy research; and
(d) with published papers at high-level academic conferences or have competition experience.
For the appointed Research Associate (AI Agent Development Engineer), applicants should also:
(a) be familiar with frontier AI technologies, including reinforcement learning and sequential decision-making methods such as PPO, GRPO, and trajectory modeling; and
(b) have rich project experience in reinforcement learning model training and deployment inference.
Preference will be given to those with:
(a) published papers at high-level academic conferences or have competition experience; and
(b) experience in financial investment or quantitative strategy research.
Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Jingran Zhao at telephone number 2766 7970 or via email at jingran.zhao@polyu.edu.hk for further information.
Conditions of Service
A highly competitive remuneration package will be offered.
Consideration of applications will commence on 18 May 2026 until the positions are filled.
Posting date: 11 May 2026