This time last year, hedge funds were celebrating the fact that engineers who were previously going into Big Tech giants like Meta and Google were instead applying to their own intern and graduate opportunities. Things don’t appear to have changed over the last 12 months, but it’s not just hedge funds doing the hiring.
One recent intern at a major electronic trading firm told us they found out about the sector from a group chat of interns at Google, where they’d previously worked. “Most of my other applications for far lower paid jobs were either immediately rejected or ghosted,” said the intern, who applied to roughly 30-50 internship opportunities in that cycle. They are going into prop trading after graduation too, having received offers from multiple firms.”
The intern had a good time in the role. “They hire you to mold and teach. You can soak up as much advice as you can, and leave the internship ten times better at your job than when you came in.”
It’s not just interns and graduates that are choosing finance over tech. Multiple senior engineers are defecting too. Jump Trading, for example, recently hired two PhD engineers with a combined 14 years of experience at Google. JiaMing Chen and Hao Luo both joined the firm this month; the former is a previous quant developer at high frequency trading firm Tower Research while the latter was a technical lead for a data migration project in Google’s ads team. Jump Trading did not respond to a request for comment.
Of course, prop trading firms have a different talent war with a newer breed of tech firm. AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have unabashedly pursued AI talent over the past year, offering up to $3m for junior quants. If that means prop trading isn’t at the top of the food chain for elite tech talent, it can take solace in the fact that it’s not at the bottom.
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