Which Hedge Funds pay the best?

Not sure what you mean fairly experienced but distressed HFs don't tend to give a huge amount of credit to people who come in with non-relevant experience. if you meant say you came in from associate 2 RX banking to distressed HF, they usually reflect that in the base salary bump that tends to top out around 200-300 and rest of comp coming in discretionary.

A frame of reference (there's a huge amount of variability and the meritocratic nature of performance can quickly sift top performers outside of these ranges while non-performers or people who can't stomach industry tend to leave or start firm-hopping before they get 3-4 yrs impregnated with the same firm):

• $300-450 1st year comp (i.e. 1-3 yrs out of college)
• $350-550 2nd year
• $450-600 3rd year
• $500-1mm 4-7th yrs (it will become highly variable including potentially lower bonuses than your prior years based on fund performance, how firm values your longetivity, responsibility / coverage, P&L "ownership" i.e. if you were sr. guy who entered trade that made firm $100-300mm of P&L for the year..expect to be handsomely rewarded etc.)
• $1mm +/- 500k for non-partner MDs (i.e. starting ~mid-30s and remember this funnel is very small of people actually in these ranks)
• $2-5mm+ for Partners (could be much much more or slightly less and highly dependent on when they became partner and what % of GP they got...early guys clear it out year-in / year-out as big funds reach significant critical mass that revenue variability on just mgmt. fee alone can support the low end of their comp setups and big bonus years can hugely drive payout)

The easiest way to think about how they are paying the firm as a whole is just run a a best-estimate P&L of the firm, how much revenue do all their funds bring in per year (probably 1-1.2% blended mgmt on true flagship HF platform after accounting for share class/fee waivers/cuts), how much perf fees are they hitting (could be 20% of ~5-6% avr. 3-yr track records but what i've seen is most LPs starting to institute a min benchmark hurdle on credit side and certainly 6-8% hurdles on drawdown making it not as simple as "1% mgmt + 1.2% perf"...perf fee is much lower than you all simplistically think) and then take a guess at how charitable you think your founder is giving out equity as a comp tool. Good baseline is that 40-60% of GP revenues should flow back to partners (variable depending on lumpiness of perf fees). Operating leverage in asset management business is immense so a well-oiled machine and especially one where founder isn't totally selfish, should be running total expenses in the 40-60% range post bonus payouts. A decent size HF ($10-20bn) will likely be running in the 20-50mm range for non-comp expenses including all the back office, rent/utilities, research/other investment team tools, software/IT/quant stuff, legal/accounting etc.

I think to another poster's point earlier, at really successful equity funds it isn't totally uncommon for that equivalent 4-7th yr sr. analyst to be funneling in a lot more than the 500k-1mm (some getting as as high as partner level $) but as we know, active equities is also a dying field.