A recruiter told me that DE Shaw, Two Sigma etc. wouldn’t hesitate to pay around a million TC for the first year (even without performance based TC) to attract specific talent (e.g in ML or time-series). How true is it? How much of seniority would be expected to achieve that? Current TC:$650k
DE Shaw doesnt do industry hires pretty well so keep that in mind. Almost everyone they hire is straight from school its kinda weird so its tough to know how much they pay industry hires. About Two Sigma their sde salaries are almost exactly the same as G salaries and from my understanding from folks untill you are a QR who had come up with actual models you wont get rewarded this way.
I think their SDE salaries are a little bit better than G. Levels 3/4 seem to map to G L4/5 pretty well, and I think the lower end of the bands are higher. TS QR has a somewhat "collaborative" structure I believe (different asset classes are siloed, but there aren't competing people in the same group with their own pnl iirc) so the QR pay is not as high variance.
I don’t know about 2S but Jane Street, Jump, RenTec probably can. Maybe Citadel too. JS for sure cause I saw someone in SWE with 935k TC. RenTec too for sure.
Def true
It's not uncommon at all, my friend with 1yoe and 3 internships was just promoted and he's making 1.5 mil
Oh yeah. It's definitely common for 1YOE in finance industry to make 1.5M
Yeah. Actually let me tell you about my sister's boyfriend, he only has 5 yoe, just a normal SWE at citadel making 3 mil. Thats 500k salary and 2.5 mil stock. Totally not lying, why would anyone lie on the internet?
op are you L6 at Google and doing ML? Ordinary swe are not paid anywhere close to 1M. I don't think it's smooch about level as it is about expertise in things they care about. Specialists in certain areas of DL/ML can get 1M+ at hedge funds for sure. For a while, experts in LDA were highly sought after.
Do you know which areas of ML/DL would be sought after now?
Ejvt23 I don't know. My guess is it may not super specific, people capable of doing great research in the general area are usually able to do their bidding. https://dealbreaker.com/2018/04/two-sigma-hires-google-brain-scientist-to-finally-make-this-damned-ai-thing-work https://www.twosigma.com/insights/article/iclr-2019-our-favorite-machine-learning-talks-and-papers/ https://www.twosigma.com/insights/article/icml-2018-our-favorite-papers-on-deep-learning-gans-optimization-and-more/
Wouldn't hesitate is not true, 1m is pretty high and you need to have the exact skills they're looking for. Finance is not like Google where there's tons of free other people's money to throw around; no one wants to pay someone else if they're not worth it, since it eats into your own pay. I've heard of 1m signing bonus for academia hires doing NLP work they really wanted, but for those hires you can look at their published papers to figure out how much to value their expertise. I would imagine most hires that get promised 1m are already managing big teams elsewhere (and already making 7 digits). Not sure if that's your situation. Typically the really high TCs in finance come from performance pay or being super super senior. TLDR I think you can expect a bump in pay if you get an offer, but don't hold your breath for anything crazy.
Thanks for the great answer. Areas like NLP would be of long term interest to them probably so it is hard to show performance in the short term (e.g. a sentiment analysis based trading algorithm that would manage billions). How do you think they would balance that in pay?
If you already have built trading algorithms that make a lot of money it's easy to justify paying a lot. Otherwise, I think it would be up to management to figure out how much to value a certain niche technical skill or experience. It has to be niche or else you only need to pay slightly more than market. The way I imagine it is someone sees some NLP research and thinks hey if we can build something like of like that and do this part a bit better, I think we can boost pnl by x. Then they'd be willing to hire someone for x/(team size) * 0.1 amortized over their expected tenure or something.
There are some IC developers at Citadel earning a million a year, so it's not unheard of; but it's definitely not the norm. It might happen after you've worked there a couple years and prove yourself, or if you've already worked at another hedge fund and can demonstrate your skills apply to financial problems, or if come in ready to lead a team. And if you're a trader or a quant researcher in charge of strategies instead of a developer, then anything's possible. But I would not expect them to offer a million dollars to a developer who's never worked in the finance industry until you can somehow build a track record to prove yourself. If you do get an offer that high, then definitely let us know. Good luck!
For ppl already worked for a firm for some years that is possible (grow), for new hire (come from other firms) then new TC>=1M is very rare & only happen for some super-star hiring saying a world class ML researcher & engineer
I snubbed the interview for DE Shaw like a year ago, probably not the best idea.
Hmm why?