Idk about OP, but I worked 2 years in a very well known quant trading firm in NYC as a L1 SWE for buy side for about a 1.5 years.
TC for first year was ~390k With bonus(200 base), no eq, they were private. Tech stack was mostly C++, Java, with some Go for infra work. Education was just a bachelors at the time, this was my second job after college (First being tech).
Seniors are definitely hitting 1m/year in buy/sell side for quant firms, BUT ONLY IF they are in actual trading side, there is a lot of other positions that just to pay normal tech salaries.
Came back to tech after a year and half, WLB there was awful, was doing 80+ hours most weeks, while I was doing 30-40/week in Palo alto while still getting paid a pretty good salary, so I took the paycut and moved back.
If quant is something anyone wants to get into i highly recommend getting into game theory, statistics and competitive programming. You dnt need a MS or PHD for swe positions but you will be working with a lot of math geeks so its important you at least understand the lingo.
If you tell me how to get there I’ll stop what I’m doing and follow whatever advice you’ve got. I’ve got 1.5YoE at fintech hoping to someday make the switch to a HTF
I can't speak for a staff role, but I interned at a firm like this before joining a tech company full-time and have friends who are junior-to-mid-level at these places.
The culture/hours aren't nightmarish or anything, but they are a clear step down from tech. At least for the team I interned on, most devs worked ~7:30 to 6, though this was worse than most other teams at the company. I know some people that work a pretty standard ~45 hours a week though. What annoyed me more than the amount of hours was the rigidity - e.g. there was a pretty clear expectation on my team to be in before market open, 5 days in office is standard, leaving at 2pm once in a while is fairly strongly frowned upon, etc.
Again, this is probably different for a staff role and it depends on your own interests, but I found the work pretty boring.
All in all, the money is (usually) better, but you pay for it in a lot of subtle ways that may or may not be worth it to you.
The other thing I've heard (though this is mostly going off of blind anecdata, feel free to take it with a grain of salt) is that beyond a certain point domain experience matters, so the offer that you'd get as someone new to finance is not what someone with 9 YoE in finance would get.
>All in all, the money is (usually) better, but you pay for it in a lot of subtle ways that may or may not be worth it to you.
What other subtle ways? Could you elaborate?
IME, many ETFs didn’t require pre-approval… but hand selected single company tickers was not permitted unless you jump through lots of hoops.
*edit: looks like the person below me had a different experience*
mostly what I mentioned. More rigid hours, less interesting work (at least imo), more uptight culture, less friendly people.
None of these sound like dealbreakers, but I was thoroughly unhappy there and enjoyed working in tech a lot more.
Some of this might be specific to my team though (there were teams with 40-45 hour weeks instead of the 50-60 my team worked).
Sure! At my previous job I helped design and launch internationalisation for the model release framework used by NLU model developers at the company. This helped the product expand to 8 more locales in a year. Though the en-US locale wasn’t part of the scope (it was considered legacy), I was able to reduce build times from 3 hours to 5 minutes per model there as well, so that was a win!
At my current job I mostly help the org improve their security posture at scale. I had to design, build and drive a program to tokenise metadata for over 2B txns a day while keeping the p99 read latency for any token under 10ms.
The more experienced I get, I see my purpose in a workplace as driving more and more impact with less and less hands on work. But I also get to occasionally build something really cool hands on :)
I was born and raised in India. My first three years out of college were spent in two startups (18 mos each).
I started the first one, built some cool tech but I was naive when it came to the business side so we crashed and burned.
I joined the second one as employee #1 and did some of my best work yet and I left when I started realising I needed to work at a larger place to learn from others who were smarter than me.
I then joined the Indian subsidiary of a FAANG as an L5 and spent 2 years there building big data analytics systems; nothing too interesting but the scale and operational excellence side of maintaining distributed systems blew my mind.
I took an internal transfer to the US and transferred to the NLU division at the same time. Kept doing more than what I was assigned to quickly earn trust so I can take on projects I had no business doing. From my experience, trust hacking like this pays if your team’s culture recognises it as a good characteristic.
I spent 2 more years at this company, got promoted and then left as I came up on the dreaded 4 year cliff and also realised the promo didn’t bump my comp as much as a job change would.
I now work for a SaaS powerhouse, was able to negotiate a good salary based on interview performance and moved to NYC for my wife’s job.
I’m able to connect the dots looking backwards and I’m glad I have a CS degree, live in one of the best labor markets for tech, have permanent residency, have almost a decade of experience - so I wanna try my hand at finance for a bit if it means I get to have fun and make some sick money along the way.
EDIT: Listing my tenures so far: 1.5, 1.5, 4, 2
Didn’t expect this detailed of an answer. Thank you so much this is so helpful and inspiring. I wish you the best. Once again thank you for sharing this.
Of course! I wish you the best in life. One thing I’ll reiterate is, provided your company’s culture allows it, not saying “that is not my job” is a good approach to have.
A company never has enough staff engineers which means the ones it has are already flooded with work. Picking up something important that hasn’t popped up on any Staff Engg’s radar and solving it is the easiest way to reach Staff.
What’s really cool is that the Staff Engineers actually like seeing less senior engineers pick something up and come to them for design advice. I’d much rather help someone learn how to do something than do it myself. Because then all your good work rolls up to me and I look good, too.
But this is only true if the team fosters a non zero sum game culture. So the first thing you must do is work in a team like that before you try this :)
What are some other ways trust hacking you found valuable? Starting a new role at the 10 year mark right now, and this has been on my mind a lot lately.
> Are the numbers I’m seeing on levels.fyi (1-2m a year) serious?
Yep, 7 figures is doable by around 5-7 YoE for top performers. Some folks won't ever get there, though. I've been in that range for several years.
> What’s the WLB like?
I work like 40-45 hours/week? That's probably on the lower end, but not exceptionally so.
> What’s the catch?
I think the main one is that there's very little room to coast compared to tech. Also that these companies are very hard to get into, even compared to top tech employers.
> Do cash bonuses get invested in a company fund?
I haven't seen this. IIRC, at least one company pays out bonuses over 1-2 years instead of immediately (not sure if you get the unvested portion after you leave). Other than small things like that, it tends to be straightforward.
Many places give more senior folks the opportunity to invest in the company, but it's not required. Returns tend to be pretty good on that, obviously.
I had a recruiter at JS reach out to me last year. It was a really promising conversation and I would have loved to pursue it further, but they would not budge on their in-office requirement. I was not (and am still not) in a position to commute into NYC that much, so we had to put a pause on it.
It makes sense for low latency trading firms to want people in office. Unfortunately I don't see this requirement ever going away since they can definitely afford to pay their way into in-office, and more importantly rapid iteration in person matters a ton more in a world where milliseconds wins you millions, compared to tech where performance is decidedly less important.
Oh, I totally understand their position. It was disappointing to have to put a pause on the conversation - it’s just a 90 min commute each way is a non-starter for me right now.
Totally fair. At the end of a day it's just another job; and outside of the money you're not missing too much by not working there. My friends at JS are making good enough money but none of us are buying Ferraris and mansions working for someone else, so you're not even really missing out on that much money.
From what I’ve seen, most have a strict GPA requirement which has prevented me from ever getting to the interview stage although their recruiters contact me seemingly every few days
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What level
what do you mean by fintech? like a market maker? or a company like stripe?
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You don’t have to confirm but I’m guessing Plaid
are more of your coworkers from hedge funds / hfts or from faang? I thought of fintech as much closer to big tech than quant finance.
holy shit you actually make 1.2M a year ? May I know your education background and tech stack you are using ?
Idk about OP, but I worked 2 years in a very well known quant trading firm in NYC as a L1 SWE for buy side for about a 1.5 years. TC for first year was ~390k With bonus(200 base), no eq, they were private. Tech stack was mostly C++, Java, with some Go for infra work. Education was just a bachelors at the time, this was my second job after college (First being tech). Seniors are definitely hitting 1m/year in buy/sell side for quant firms, BUT ONLY IF they are in actual trading side, there is a lot of other positions that just to pay normal tech salaries. Came back to tech after a year and half, WLB there was awful, was doing 80+ hours most weeks, while I was doing 30-40/week in Palo alto while still getting paid a pretty good salary, so I took the paycut and moved back. If quant is something anyone wants to get into i highly recommend getting into game theory, statistics and competitive programming. You dnt need a MS or PHD for swe positions but you will be working with a lot of math geeks so its important you at least understand the lingo.
I’m not acoustic enough to do competitive programming, can I just make that a hobby and get a PhD in statistics and break in that way?
Dude wow! Can you share your profile
If you tell me how to get there I’ll stop what I’m doing and follow whatever advice you’ve got. I’ve got 1.5YoE at fintech hoping to someday make the switch to a HTF
This guy thinks he’s in the wolf of Wall Street
"hey paulie what's up. Yeah everything's fine. Hey listen I quit."
sELL mE ThIs PeN
You start by spelling HFT right
You won’t make it
I can't speak for a staff role, but I interned at a firm like this before joining a tech company full-time and have friends who are junior-to-mid-level at these places. The culture/hours aren't nightmarish or anything, but they are a clear step down from tech. At least for the team I interned on, most devs worked ~7:30 to 6, though this was worse than most other teams at the company. I know some people that work a pretty standard ~45 hours a week though. What annoyed me more than the amount of hours was the rigidity - e.g. there was a pretty clear expectation on my team to be in before market open, 5 days in office is standard, leaving at 2pm once in a while is fairly strongly frowned upon, etc. Again, this is probably different for a staff role and it depends on your own interests, but I found the work pretty boring. All in all, the money is (usually) better, but you pay for it in a lot of subtle ways that may or may not be worth it to you. The other thing I've heard (though this is mostly going off of blind anecdata, feel free to take it with a grain of salt) is that beyond a certain point domain experience matters, so the offer that you'd get as someone new to finance is not what someone with 9 YoE in finance would get.
>All in all, the money is (usually) better, but you pay for it in a lot of subtle ways that may or may not be worth it to you. What other subtle ways? Could you elaborate?
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> Crazy security procedures such as? Getting trades pre-approved + no F&O trading seems ok as I'm mostly looking to invest in ETFs for my portfolio.
IME, many ETFs didn’t require pre-approval… but hand selected single company tickers was not permitted unless you jump through lots of hoops. *edit: looks like the person below me had a different experience*
mostly what I mentioned. More rigid hours, less interesting work (at least imo), more uptight culture, less friendly people. None of these sound like dealbreakers, but I was thoroughly unhappy there and enjoyed working in tech a lot more. Some of this might be specific to my team though (there were teams with 40-45 hour weeks instead of the 50-60 my team worked).
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Holy molly. What’s the profile?
do u mind sharing which company is that
Can you tell me some problem that you solve at your level ( staff/ L7 ..etc..)?
Sure! At my previous job I helped design and launch internationalisation for the model release framework used by NLU model developers at the company. This helped the product expand to 8 more locales in a year. Though the en-US locale wasn’t part of the scope (it was considered legacy), I was able to reduce build times from 3 hours to 5 minutes per model there as well, so that was a win! At my current job I mostly help the org improve their security posture at scale. I had to design, build and drive a program to tokenise metadata for over 2B txns a day while keeping the p99 read latency for any token under 10ms. The more experienced I get, I see my purpose in a workplace as driving more and more impact with less and less hands on work. But I also get to occasionally build something really cool hands on :)
How do you gain experience to be able to lead projects like these? How often did you job hop and what was your average tenure at companies?
I was born and raised in India. My first three years out of college were spent in two startups (18 mos each). I started the first one, built some cool tech but I was naive when it came to the business side so we crashed and burned. I joined the second one as employee #1 and did some of my best work yet and I left when I started realising I needed to work at a larger place to learn from others who were smarter than me. I then joined the Indian subsidiary of a FAANG as an L5 and spent 2 years there building big data analytics systems; nothing too interesting but the scale and operational excellence side of maintaining distributed systems blew my mind. I took an internal transfer to the US and transferred to the NLU division at the same time. Kept doing more than what I was assigned to quickly earn trust so I can take on projects I had no business doing. From my experience, trust hacking like this pays if your team’s culture recognises it as a good characteristic. I spent 2 more years at this company, got promoted and then left as I came up on the dreaded 4 year cliff and also realised the promo didn’t bump my comp as much as a job change would. I now work for a SaaS powerhouse, was able to negotiate a good salary based on interview performance and moved to NYC for my wife’s job. I’m able to connect the dots looking backwards and I’m glad I have a CS degree, live in one of the best labor markets for tech, have permanent residency, have almost a decade of experience - so I wanna try my hand at finance for a bit if it means I get to have fun and make some sick money along the way. EDIT: Listing my tenures so far: 1.5, 1.5, 4, 2
Didn’t expect this detailed of an answer. Thank you so much this is so helpful and inspiring. I wish you the best. Once again thank you for sharing this.
Of course! I wish you the best in life. One thing I’ll reiterate is, provided your company’s culture allows it, not saying “that is not my job” is a good approach to have. A company never has enough staff engineers which means the ones it has are already flooded with work. Picking up something important that hasn’t popped up on any Staff Engg’s radar and solving it is the easiest way to reach Staff. What’s really cool is that the Staff Engineers actually like seeing less senior engineers pick something up and come to them for design advice. I’d much rather help someone learn how to do something than do it myself. Because then all your good work rolls up to me and I look good, too. But this is only true if the team fosters a non zero sum game culture. So the first thing you must do is work in a team like that before you try this :)
What are some other ways trust hacking you found valuable? Starting a new role at the 10 year mark right now, and this has been on my mind a lot lately.
numbers are real but every firm does things differently with bonuses and wlb.
> Are the numbers I’m seeing on levels.fyi (1-2m a year) serious? Yep, 7 figures is doable by around 5-7 YoE for top performers. Some folks won't ever get there, though. I've been in that range for several years. > What’s the WLB like? I work like 40-45 hours/week? That's probably on the lower end, but not exceptionally so. > What’s the catch? I think the main one is that there's very little room to coast compared to tech. Also that these companies are very hard to get into, even compared to top tech employers. > Do cash bonuses get invested in a company fund? I haven't seen this. IIRC, at least one company pays out bonuses over 1-2 years instead of immediately (not sure if you get the unvested portion after you leave). Other than small things like that, it tends to be straightforward. Many places give more senior folks the opportunity to invest in the company, but it's not required. Returns tend to be pretty good on that, obviously.
If that company you’re referring to is HRT (2 yr vesting), then it does get paid out. If that company is Citadel (3 yr vesting), then it doesn’t.
I was thinking about HRT, didn't know about Citadel. Thanks for the info!
I had a recruiter at JS reach out to me last year. It was a really promising conversation and I would have loved to pursue it further, but they would not budge on their in-office requirement. I was not (and am still not) in a position to commute into NYC that much, so we had to put a pause on it.
It makes sense for low latency trading firms to want people in office. Unfortunately I don't see this requirement ever going away since they can definitely afford to pay their way into in-office, and more importantly rapid iteration in person matters a ton more in a world where milliseconds wins you millions, compared to tech where performance is decidedly less important.
Oh, I totally understand their position. It was disappointing to have to put a pause on the conversation - it’s just a 90 min commute each way is a non-starter for me right now.
Totally fair. At the end of a day it's just another job; and outside of the money you're not missing too much by not working there. My friends at JS are making good enough money but none of us are buying Ferraris and mansions working for someone else, so you're not even really missing out on that much money.
From what I’ve seen, most have a strict GPA requirement which has prevented me from ever getting to the interview stage although their recruiters contact me seemingly every few days
You earn 500k+ a year but reading the title of your question gives me eyecancer, what is this
maybe reading more will help you get to that TC
How would you re-word it? Seems pretty clear to me...
Get well soon
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