SWE at Hedge Fund vs FinTech Startup - New Grad looking for advice

Hey Blind community, I am current CS masters student at top school in London and have received offers from two companies a hedge fund (no not 2S, Citadel or JS) but still has about 60b AUM but is generally quite small ~300 employees globally and HQ in London and a FinTech startup which is currently in a growth stage with around ~300 employees founded by ex Google Employees. Im having a difficult time deciding which offer I should go with. The main factors that are important to me are: career progression (learning and skills development), WLB, work culture in that order. With plans to aim for FANG or similar in 2 years or so time. HF pros: TC - come on it's finance no surprises here - left more details about TC below but would be a considerable amount more than the startup (maybe 50% - 70% more) Rotation program - this particular HF offers new grads a rotation program where you spend 3/4 months in various teams in their tech department e.g data, infra, production which I feel like would be good for learning and finding out what I enjoy. Cons: Longer work hours, 8am - 6pm, 10 hour days Need to wear business attire, smart trousers and button shirt - even for tech employees Its not one of the well known tech oriented HFs, judging from my time interviewing there it does seem like they generally do have a modern tech stack and are investing into technology but I've often heard negative things about tech in finance from friends (albeit mainly from large corporate banks). Therefore, A concern of mine would be joining and learning technology that is either old and outdated or not used elsewhere in the industry. They work with C#, Python, Scala, Powershell etc. (Windows shop) FinTech pros: Tech company at heart: SWEs are first class citizens since they are building the main product Very modern tech stack - CTO and a bunch of early employees are ex googlers so they bought over a lot of the SWE practices/tech google have - mono repo, gRPC, heavy users of Go, Python, Kubernetes Docker, Kafka etc - so I feel like learning valuable stuff definitely wouldn't be a concern here. Much more chill work hours standard 9 - 5. Better WLB overall, more relaxed, less strict, regular social activities for employees, less pressure to deliver compared to HF etc. Hedge Fund TC breakdown ~ £50k base, £5k sign on, performance based bonus (firm's performance plus your own individual performance) they wouldn't specify past figures but I think it can be anywhere from 40% and up of your base salary. my anticipated TC for my first year with a 40% bonus would be around £70k and if bonus turns out to be higher then could be looking at the range £80 - £90k. Which by the way for the UK SWE market is very very good for grad offer. FinTech Startup ~ £55k base. Again this is still a really good offer for new grad in the UK market (UK pay is trash compared to silicon valley). I feel like either one would be a good first job, but the big question is can I justify turning my back on potentially £20k - 35k+ pay difference. At the same time, I'd be kicking myself, if I join the HF and end up hating the longer hours or feel like the technology Im learning isn't what I envisioned. Let me know if I can provide more information that I may have missed out. All advice is appreciated, Thanks in advance! #tech #finance #career