Are desk strats well paid?

Desk strats are basically another name for desk developers, especially if you're being hired in at the undergrad level. Your job will be to do all of the coding that the traders, salespeople, trading assistants, etc need done that cannot be done by IT. As you continue in the position, and things seem to be going well, you'll be developing new analytics, signals, and also figuring out and coordinating the desk's needs with the managers in IT. It's not that you'll be managing IT, but you'll be one of their many indirect managers, and you'll be helping guys 20 years older than you managing programmers 10 years older than you figure out what the desk wants from their teams. You'll get to see some of the good bad and ugly of how projects go well, how they go wrong, and the like in a way that a typical bank programmer doesn't. You'll get to see how IT policies help the business and how they harm it.

This is not a great place to start from if you're trying to become the head of a desk or the CEO. If you're trying to become the CIO or CTO, this is an IDEAL place to start. If you eventually want to go into systematic strategies at a hedge fund or some sort of data science role involving finance, this is also really good experience. Just make sure to switch roles before you get to an age where a heart attack is a remote possibility. Desk Strat used to be a role that one of the better quant developers would get promoted into after a couple years of doing really good work at a bank (in one of the QA groups that was a little more selective about who got hired in the first place), so it's a bit of a coup that you may get to start in that role. The traders will all tell you that the desk strat is supposed to be one of the smartest, most competent, and most productive programmers out of the hundreds and hundreds of technologists supporting that desk. (Whether this is the truth or not, I don't know.)

The pay is OK, but you will make less than traders and salespeople. You will make something on the order of the geometric mean between what a trader makes and what a typical bank programmer makes. At the end of the day, there is PNL attributable to your group and a lot of what you do influences their PNL, but there is no PNL directly attributable to you, so this will probably never be a seven figure role. (It is almost certainly a six figure role).

A lot of desk strats go on to grad school to get an MFE or MBA after a few years. Despite the hierarchy on the trading floor, it's easier to get into an MBA program as a desk developer than as a trader. Grad schools still largely categorize you as a tech guy so you compete in a different category than all of the people desperately leaving finance these days. Meanwhile, the head of the desk is routinely heading off to Stanford and HBS to hire MBA for sales roles, and if you're doing a good job, he (along with two other traders) will write a letter of reference about how you are the programmer who sits in S&T and makes IT run well, you are one of the top 0.1% programmers on Wall Street, your desk calls the two or three desk strats the Navy SEALs of programming, etc. etc. So HBS and Stanford or an MIT/Princeton/Stanford/CMU MFE should be within reach from this role if that is what you want. If you're thrifty, commute in from Hoboken or Brooklyn, and work for three years, you'll also probably be able to graduate B-school debt-free.

This is not an easy job if you sign up for it full-time. In order to survive at this, you have to be in the top 20% of coders at communication skills, top 10% at coding, and ~top 1% at mental toughness. You will have traders scream at you. Stuff will break and the desk will be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour until you get it back up and running. Traders and salespeople will be shouting over your shoulder all day long executing trades and you'll be trying to stay focused working on implementing models. But if you want to be a programmer at an ibank, this is the coolest job there is, IMHO. It's also great experience. I'm not sure I'd want to do it at 35, though.

It's good that you get to see all of this during an internship. There are a lot of ways to screw up this role, and there are only a few ways to succeed. By the end of the summer, you and the desk will know if you're a good fit for the job. If it doesn't work out, you can try and leverage this experience for a role at a data science firm like a Palantir or maybe go for a portfolio strategy research role at this or a similar bank. There's a lot of overlap here with roles that require a lot of coding, math, data, and analytics, and there are a lot more front-office roles in finance for these kinds of backgrounds than there were five years ago.

Long-term, this experience gives you the same or better opportunity to have a successful career as the trading interns you will be supporting. If I were a college student, knowing what I know now about long-term careers on Wall Street, I'd actually have a tough time choosing between a trading role and a desk strat role. But I'd also go in knowing that I'd have to spend 2-3 years gritting my teeth about being the poorest guy in sales and trading.

I say take the offer, but talk to family and friends. I'm also only one data point, although I sat in this specific role (in equity derivatives) for three years.

Not too many people ask about this role on WSO, because not too many people sit in it or get hired into it. I always tell people that I worked in Sales and Trading. They then ask me if I was Sales or Trading, and I get to say "Neither- I was the desk strat. It wasn't all that glamorous, but it was a lot of fun." The weird roles like the desk strat, the risk analyst (often a PhD who works for the MD), and the marketing coordinator (typically an experienced former salesperson) are roles every large team of traders has but tend to confuse folks.

You may be able to get better advice on this from quantnet: http://www.quantnet.com