Moving from AS at Amazon to Quant Trader
Currently a L5 AS at Amazon, making good money (tc below) On promo path to L6 but org is saturated with L6 scientists and any promotion post L6 in org/Amazon looks hard/ upto politics. It feels like there’s a very quick ceiling of 600-700k at the L6 AS level and any movement beyond that is years in the making. I’m considering moving to a quant trading firm (have a few friends from PhD working at JS/2 sigma). Don’t care about wlb since I’m young (29) and also have no wlb at Amazon anyway lol. Optimizing solely for money and nothing else is it worth considering moving from tech to quant trading? TC 400k Yoe 3+PhD
Your consideration is useless before you get offers
As someone with 6 years post PhD, that’s a good salary.
It looks like your current TC is partially thanks to stock rise, 3 yoe means you probably get the 2020 bottom. So with L6 promotion, your TC should go up meaningfully. 700k is almost close to the ceiling for most quants, unless stars align. I suggest that you wait a bit for the promotion if possible, then see if the quant funds can actually change your mind. One thing you should consider is that there are target schools etc at top quant funds. Nowadays it is even easier for quant funds to attract people out of Brain or FAIR, compared to 2021 height. So depending on your background, recruiters may decide whether to go after you with a big package or not. Not all job candidates are treated the same.
Yeah I think that’s sound advice. Target promo and then think about moving to quant. Not too worried about the target school since there’s plenty of alums from my school who work at quant funds. It just seems like you are rewarded proportional to what you put in at a quant firm. I don’t really care much about promo but seems like promo is the only way to increase tc in tech while friends at quant funds are making 2-3x bonuses for doing well.
if the fund does well, that is, and some quant and hft funds have done well for the past 3 years so it is easy to mistake that as the norm. It will also be harder at older funds. It is like going from 60% accuracy to 90% is probably not as hard as from 90% to 95%, but your pnl cut is not 30% but just 5%. For example, some Citadel folks may hit 1M thanks to the outstanding year 2022, but that is not necessarily the case now. (You can google how these big funds are doing now, positive but not crazy).
Most people don't make more than 700k even in Quant shops. Yeah some do, and I personally know 2, but it's not the norm. The past 3 years have been amazingly well but that's not a norm, and this year isn't going well for most funds. Look at YTD performance of all the funds
“Consider” it if you can get offers, although I’ve heard really mixed things about Two sigma these days. They also don’t seem to be hiring much at all right now. I also don’t know many people with the profile you suggest working at JS Are you in ML/CS PhD? I’ve seen a lot of extremely well published people from my PhD leave Amazon for Morgan Stanley ML research group recently. Not sure how much they pay but perhaps worth looking into, they seem to be hiring some really strong people
Yeah ML/CS PhD