Quant developers, not quant researchers may hold $2.5m jobs at this top trading firm
Many of the highest paying jobs in finance belong to quants, but not all quant jobs are equal. Quant researchers tend to have the better reputation, but one electronic trading firm paying an average of $2.5m doesn't seem to employ any quant researchers at all.
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Quadrature Capital, a London-based electronic trading firm, is known for trading via high-powered AI algorithms bolstered by a fleet of GPUs and might be expected to employ quant researchers to create the strategies that those algorithms use to trade. Instead, in an open call for quants, it says it has a "unified team of quant developers," who work on both research and development tasks at the firm.
In practice, this seems to mean that most of Quadrature's 140+ UK employees are either quant developers or engineers. Few people at the firm identify themselves as quant researchers on LinkedIn. Few are traders, either.
Instead, Quadrature's quant developers seem to do both. It says it's quant-focused staff "are good programmers," while its most elite programmers also "have the opportunity to do research." All quants are expected to "program to a high level" in order "to develop and test their ideas independently." It's not all about coding, though, as quants will be expected to develop systematic trading models using both statistical and machine learning methods.
Few of Quadrature's developers previously worked in quant research, but there are a few. For example, team lead Paul Smith was once a quant researcher at Jump Trading and Natwest. There are also people like team lead Mateusz Kapka, who joined from Balyasny where he was a software engineer.
What kind of technical skills are Quadrature looking for? The firm said its staff "work with Python or C++ on a day-to-day basis;" staff are expected to produce "extremely high-performance, highly reliable and finely-tuned numeric computational programs" in both languages.
Quadrature's developers are also working with powerful hardware. Another listing for its infrastructure department says it has "over 20,000 CPU cores, 2,000 GPUs, 500TB of RAM and 10PB of storage." Jane Street, which has more than ten times as many employees, is working with ~5,000 GPUs. However, XTX Markets has ten times as many GPUs, and 15 times as much RAM. The listing says it is Quadrature's "vision to build the Ultimate Automated Trading System."
Little is known about the inner workings of Quadrature, which likes to keep itself tight-lipped, but preferring developers to researchers isn't its only quirk. It supposedly has beer on tap, for example, but its staff aren't thought to regularly drink it.
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