I'm in discussions with a couple HFTs, and I was curious about career progression. Specifically, how does one become an eng manager at these firms starting as a dev? How does one become eng lead of a larger org?
BTW Jane Street and most of Two Sigma is not HFT. It depends on how big the company is. Most HFT firms tend to be on the smaller side. For example there’s no way I could become a manager within 5-10 years unless my company becomes 3x its current size. I have no interest in becoming a manager here though, because there are many ways to lead projects and have a large amount of impact without having “manager” in your title. Why do you want to become a manager? If it’s TC then don’t bother because you can easily earn 2-3x your base (or more) as bonus if you’re a great developer. If you specifically want to do people management, then remaining at a tech company is probably the right choice. When you work with a small team of consistently high performing ICs, there’s much less demand for people managers. If you still want to be a manager in HFT I recommend looking at the larger companies like Citadel, Jump and HRT as opposed to the smaller ones.
Oh and forgot to mention the portfolio manager path (e.g. for a place like Tower), but that’s very different to engineering manager and probably isn’t an option given your current situation.
Get hired in as a manager. Quant firms are small with flat structures, so management is rarely obtained through promotion. Worked for a different quant fund
That's interesting. At the one I left practically none of the dev managers were hired up. They were often hired out of other quant funds or FANG-types
I think we may have hired a dev manager once. But yeah, not a good route by the numbers.
I think op should tag companies like jump trading, quantlab, etc. not citadel or two sigma
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I see. Are most people ICs their whole career at JSC or do they eventually move to management?
How would they eventually move to management? Lets say JSC has 300 devs and 60 managers. It would be impossible for "most ICs" to eventually become managers clearly, since there are so many fewer management positions (unless the firm grows 5x).