Current L5 Google. TC - 365K. YOE - 9 Got contacted by recruiters from Jane street and Citadel. Quant developer position. Can they beat > 500k TC ? Given they are niche finance shops is their potential for devs to cross 7 figures ? Also can Swe change tracks to pure quant roles ?
I interviewed with some HFT companies and they were a waste of time. Maybe I am just dumb. But when the acceptance rate is so low it is not worth my time to interview.
If you're as swe at LinkedIn I can assure you you're plenty qualified to work at any hft you desire. It is very possible the questions you got at that time and day just were unlucky. Sorry to hear it.
Iβm at a better place now π But I sometimes get recruiter messages claiming they pay $500K to $750K and those are generally too good to be true and a waste of my time.
Iβve seen numbers quoted at 500k for senior dev at citadel but wlb sucks. Also seen 500k for 5 yoe at JS for dev.
How is comp at 2S like 5 years in?
On average probably 350k so about same as G / FB
Yes, $500k is very attainable. I passed that at 4 yoe. 7 figures is also possible although not everyone will get there. I'm closing in on it and will probably get there at 8 yoe or so. I don't see much movement from swe to quant, possibly none. I'm pretty far away from that side of things, though, so I could just not be seeing it.
Can you describe the nature of works SDEs do in these hft companies? I'm a Sr engineer in AWS with experience in building large scale data systems.
Jane Street isn't really HFT, and is also probably not typical for a trading firm. For example, we put significant resources into things like the OCaml compiler, an OCaml stdlib replacement, and such. We also have a lot of internal tooling like our own code review system and some large vim/emacs setups. More typically, we have trading systems (the strategies themselves are implemented by quants, but swes build the platform), market data parsers/aggregators, position tracking, compliance reporting, etc. Some of these are latency-sensitive applications, some are more straightforward business logic. The main difference between swe at a place like Jane Street and a more typical tech company is that we have few to no externally-facing applications - pretty much all of the users of our software are colleagues.
How are you getting contacted, off LinkedIn?
Mind sharing your experience and the interview process? How to prepare for interviews?
I'm currently a quant so I may be able to offer some input. Per dev role, I can't promise, but they can probably beat it if you can bring the talent. Those firms seem to have endless cash when it comes to talent. Pure quant track will require in depth knowledge in stochastic calculus, probability, statistics and the obvious other branches of math required for intense statistical signal processing. I have seen questions in some interviews that I hadn't seen outside of my PhD coursework from top 5 institution. In addition, you will likely need to have concrete grounding in data structures and algorithms. Would not be shocked if you catch design questions alongside the obvious algo questions. All in all, a quant role at these firms expect MS+ Math knowledge with BS+ CS knowledge. If you have research, publications or patents, it will help your case significantly. Finally, if you're not a fan of intense, and I mean intense, mathematics, I highly advise you research the kind of math that goes into a quant research role.
Would you say that dev roles donβt require intensely strong Math skills?
Absolutely not. Some math skills, for the sake of grounded computer science logic, sure. But I have yet to meet an elite dev that needs to understand minimum-variance unbiased estimator to improve their C++ template writing.