Qube RT. Interviewed with them. Have about 7 years of experience as a quant in banks. Get paid around 400k. Was told that they can’t guarantee me anything and was dinged because of comp reasons. Was told over the phone that I am getting paid well and they can’t up more than what I am already getting. Thought hedge funds pay really well. The discussion didn’t even go to the next round.
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Oh, that's a bit of a curveball, isn't it? It's not uncommon for hedge funds to pay well, but it seems like QRT had a different approach. It's a bit surprising that they didn't want to negotiate further, especially considering your experience. But hey, every firm has its own culture and compensation structure.
Remember, it's not just about the money. It's also about the work environment, the learning opportunities, and the potential for growth. So, don't let this experience discourage you. There are plenty of other hedge funds out there that might value your experience more. Keep your chin up and keep swinging!
Sources: Just experienced the worst interview ever, QRT ( Qube Research and Technologies ), Strangest thing you've seen/heard at work?, Weird Internship experience
STFU bot
I don’t know enough about London/Europe comp. $400k for that experience in the US is low but they may have been trying to bring you in at an entry level for their office.
Thanks for your response! Is it typical to bring in folks with 6-7 yoe at entry level in a hedge fund? I have never worked at a hedge fund and hence that might be the case. They are into low and mid frequency trading. Someone at Director level was telling me that they don’t use ML etc. much and they are into multi-strategy. Should I see it more like a basic strategy ideation and data analysis and testing a hypothesis.
$400k is at the upper end of “entry” for top places; so it would be equivalent to someone with ~3 years of experience at a good but not absolutely top place (in the US and not counting places like citadel).
And many HFs will value your experience less unless it is directly applicable to what they are trying to do. They figure they have to train you anyway and when you have experience you might learn quicker but unless you come with pnl ideas (or being able to manage a large team) you won’t add much more value than a smart person with 1 year of experience.
Were you asking for over $400k in salary or salary+bonus? Sure, you’ll get a reasonably high salary, but aren’t hedge funds usually about the performance bonus??? Would be interested to hear more specifics on your experience & focus areas if you care to share
I’m going to assume the OP meant all in comp, that is usually what people will quote here. Salary doesn’t really matter at many places (I.e., some pods only give PM’s $200k base and the bonus is millions if performance is good).
Yes 400k+ in total comp. They had asked me basic questions about my resume to understand what I worked on etc. It was more of an introductory call.
They have a discretionary instead of pnl linked bonus structure. Most places with such structure don't pay big bonuses, they may pay consistently though (i.e even in bad years).
Not everyone can pay what you want. Just be glad they were upfront about it early instead of wasting your time with multiple rounds before telling you.
Yeah, I would have expected "7 years of experience as a quant in banks" to get more than 400k at a quant hedge fund, but it really depends on what your experience is and what the new company is looking for. "I'm a quant!!!" can mean anything from hardcode PhD level alpha research to basic entry-level run-some-sql-queries-and-make-a-graph-with-matplotlib type work.
Don't sweat it. Everybody gets rejected from interviews sometimes. Just move on to the next one.
Yeah makes sense. I have an expertise in LLMs meaning that I can create models, optimize them, reduce model size etc etc. I can combine ideas from multiple transformer models and create a new one etc. However, I don’t think I will be able to beat state-of-the-art models in performance.
I also have PhD level expertise at fundamental equities. As I was a PhD student but didn’t finish it. True that I haven’t worked in a hedge fund environment. However, I was surprised that they were not able to pay as I had gone into the meeting with a preconceived notion that hedge fund would value my experience. But as you said, I am glad that they didn’t waste much of my time, I got to know about the firm, and not everyone can pay me what I expect.
If you have that kind of expertise, you can land better deals in tech than in quant finance and QRT. Yes, even in this down market. Not talking about those GPT wrapper companies, but there's a whole bunch of FAANG and equivalent and well as VC backed startups doing deep research in foundational models that are paying near your current salary for even fresh PhD grads (top ones of course).
400K USD or GBP?
maybe your past experience is not completely correlated to a quant hedge fund, so there is a discount for your years.
400k GBP
I assume 400K is base salary plus the guaranteed bonus? There should be extra discretionary bonus...
No - base plus bonus combined is 400k. Saw the profile for a couple of QRs who work for them; some of them had an absolutely terrible profile. I don’t think they work at a cutting edge.
No, most of these places won’t pay $400k base, especially for a junior/mid level
Also, no one really complains about base (unless it’s ridiculously low) since that is usually just the “keep the lights on” money for an employee. The HF model (at many places) is to pay similar to how the HF gets paid, which is off of fees, specifically performance. This is very true at the senior levels and also pretty true at multi manager platforms.
The exceptions are:
1) guarantees to bring senior people on
2) junior employees that have less control over pnl and where the bonus is relatively small
Outside of this comp scales through the variable portion of the comp, and very little in the fixed portion
do you know how much Qube pays for a fresh grad?
No I don’t for them specifically. I work in the industry (now for a long time) and have a lot of benchmarking data across most top funds.
What would be a typical comp for someone working as a QR for a decade, assuming normal career progression?
Do you have an answer now?
btw, the team you interviewed is from London of HK office?
Pretty hard to define “normal”. But some things to think about:
1) if you make it 10 years you’ve usually either found a comfortable spot/niche that is good but not great or you are getting to the point in your career where you are doing really well, have pnl linkage or similar, running large teams, etc (basically you are in a senior role, 10 yrs at a HF can be pretty senior)
2) if you have pnl linkage/are working in a more pod like structure it’s going to be completely based on performance
3) in that performance based world you can expect $1-2mm in a normal/good year
4) In the “found a comfortable spot” path the ceiling is usually more in the $600k-$1mm
5) if you get to the “more senior” roles you are looking at $4-5mm+ in the good/very good years
At “top”/close to top places it is usually $250-400k to start.
Progress depends on how good you are, but get to $700k over 6-8 years if you are great ($500-600k if you are good and faster if you have pnl). And then it’ll really ramp from there depending on how senior you become. I can say for me it jumped from $700k to $4-5mm pretty quickly once I got more direct pnl.
Edit: this is for QR. many places define quant broadly and many of those have more like $500-600k ceilings.
Around 120k in Paris and 140k in London
I feel like I might be in the minority with this view, but I don't think <400k all in is that surprising. It's consistent with the salaries listed on Glassdoor for Qube and consistent with what I heard they pay. Hedge fund comp is a lot lower in Europe than it is in the States, even within the same company sometimes. It's a crude approximate, but generally a company's pay is proportional to company pnl/headcount. This ratio is simply larger in some companies than others and be down to several factors such as pnl, costs (I expect this is big for companies like Qube which have high headcount), prop v investor funded, management fees, etc.
Tbh they probably don’t think you can add 400k of value
Ask yourself if you can generate >2m of PnL in your first year on the buy side. The answer is probably no so you shouldn’t think you deserve 400k
I’m not on OPs side at all but come on - $2m? That’s nothing. A grad could do that.
Rly? Then open your fund, hire 100 grads and voila — you have a firm which makes 200m revenue.
Sweet dream
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