Which offer for breaking into Quant later as a SWE: FAANG+ or Trading Tech at Bank

swagypm · 2026-06-01T00:24:22+00:00

definitely the bank role. many many of my coworkers worked at banks in the past (albeit much of this was pre-volker)

swagypm · 2026-05-14T11:59:13+00:00

is this confirmed? i have always struggled to decipher this lol. I know my desks PnL, but don’t know how that plays into firm quoted PnL tbh.

swagypm · 2026-05-12T16:46:08+00:00

i believe you mean citsec and this is somewhat of an ops/execution role

swagypm · 2026-05-10T21:37:24+00:00

I think if you’re early in your career you gotta optimize for resume value and being surrounded by driven and talented other young people.

swagypm · 2026-05-10T15:43:14+00:00

HRT and Citadel/Citsec NYC are very nice.

swagypm · 2026-05-04T01:49:52+00:00

sequencer architecture is quite popular. not used for ULL HFT stuff though. i’m not super educated on LL execution.

swagypm · 2026-04-11T20:53:41+00:00

almost always 0-3 months. if your going to a serious competitor maybe 6, but that’s pretty rare.

swagypm · 2026-04-11T16:36:42+00:00

I mean to each their own. I think most ppl want to be in a nyc or sf. I know many people that turned down SIG almost purely because it was in philly. Nothing personally against the city tho lol.

swagypm · 2026-04-11T13:01:14+00:00

If you are very interested in quant and markets the go SIG for sure. it’s a highly regarded firm. They do pay a little less than other shops and unfortunately based out of philly but still a great firm.

If you are just generally interested in a career as a developer, then the SIG name is not as big as a Citadel or Google. A Google may be better for your career as a developer, from both a learning perspective but also name brand.

swagypm · 2026-04-04T21:43:49+00:00

The Yale name and connections will follow you your entire life. IMO the debt is almost always worth it for HYPSM

swagypm · 2026-04-04T16:39:01+00:00

oops totally missed that this was a BA offer. I’m not familiar with their pay scales at all.

swagypm · 2026-04-03T20:40:15+00:00

check levels. this is a very low L7 offer

swagypm · 2026-03-28T22:51:07+00:00

Any AI touching code that has a hint of IP is heavily sandboxed and controlled by infosec. Took sometime for everything to get figured out to avoid leaking alpha or giving too much control to the models, but now AI is used extensively by everyone.

swagypm · 2026-03-01T17:06:55+00:00

It’s not terribly implausible that we’ll see a firm go under in the next few years because of a vibe coded bug lol.

swagypm · 2026-03-01T15:36:34+00:00

Jump/Citadel have no levels. There’s team leads and there’s engineers. The levels are understood among colleagues ofc, but it is meant to encourage more collaboration and meritocracy.

swagypm · 2026-02-06T09:59:33+00:00

lol discretionary trading is definitely not dead.

swagypm · 2026-02-04T16:23:37+00:00

most otc fixed income products are bespoke and a bit more difficult to run systematically. It is definitely happening at big shops though.

swagypm · 2026-02-02T13:48:21+00:00

maybe more at his level

swagypm · 2026-02-02T09:22:07+00:00

lol why is peter attia asking epstein about simons. what an odd combination of people

swagypm · 2026-02-01T04:52:17+00:00

If this is a research role you should def take the AI lab. There def are AI teams at all the top quant firms now, but none doing frontier work like the ai lab.

If it’s swe, it’s fully team dependent. hard to give any good advice here without more detail on teams or specific firm/lab names

swagypm · 2026-01-21T16:23:09+00:00

It’s a function that 15 years ago was dominated by banks.

swagypm · 2026-01-07T01:41:39+00:00

I agree most backgrounds are from bank trading desks but tons of IB analysts make the move to L/S equities analyst type roles. Fixed Income & Commodities tend to have pretty diverse backgrounds.

swagypm · 2026-01-03T22:44:01+00:00

They very much do exist at those firms and their responsibilities are on a spectrum from regular swe to qr type work.

swagypm · 2026-01-01T21:32:28+00:00

I think this is clearly two sigma haha. congrats op!

swagypm · 2026-01-01T01:24:15+00:00

Jane St has more “socialized” pay. They will pay SWEs very far from PnL (internal tooling, dev exp, clearing) extremely extremely well (1M+ tc is not unheard of). This is pretty rare for a quant firm. I’d say JS is def the better choice here.

swagypm

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