The highest paid entry-level engineers in the world are at Hudson River Trading and Jane Street
OpenAI might be paying exorbitant fees to poach quants and traders from prop trading firms, but it's a different story when it comes to engineering talent. Levels.fyi has released its annual compensation report which shows that the two best companies for entry-level engineering roles are Hudson River Trading and Jane Street.
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Jane Street has historically won in this category but, this year, Hudson River took the crown. It bumped up pay to an eye-watering $400k on average, while Jane Street stayed flat at $350k. 3rd place OpenAI, in comparison, paid just $300k.
Five of the top 7 firms for level-1 engineers were finance firms in one way or another. Quant hedge fund Two Sigma came fourth, New York fintech Ramp came fifth, and Dutch prop trading firm Optiver came sixth; each paid between $255k-265k on average. Rounding out the list was data infrastructure firm Databricks.
The finance firms weren't as prominent as seniority rose, but AI firms were. For mid and senior engineering jobs, the top paying firm was Claude developer Anthropic, which paid $540k to mid-level and $746k to senior engineers. OpenAI came first for engineering manager roles, which paid $1.3m on average.
Jane Street is still the top paying firm for one entry-level role: data scientists. It paid $300k on average, above Google in second and hedge fund Citadel in third. For senior data scientists, fintech Stripe ranked sixth; it used to be a stalwart on the top paying ranks for principal engineering roles (the most senior rank), but fell off the ranking last year. It is, however, the third-best paying firm for senior product managers.
How to get an entry level role at Jane Street or Hudson River Trading
Getting into these firms requires making a lot of smart choices, not least regarding where you study. A senior quant recruiter in New York said Jane Street does "extensive campus recruiting" and will "likely meet all of these candidates on campus as part of that effort." It travels to "select universities globally" and will "only recruit from those schools." We've compiled a list of its most popular schools among current and former employees here.
Jane Street and HRT may both be prop trading firms, but they're culturally very different. One high-frequency trader told us that the former is a 'Chicago style' trading firm that wants its staff to have excellent probability fundamentals and to be good at mental math. Hudson River is instead a 'New York style' firm, that is more focused on your technical skills.
Getting a full-time graduate job at these firms is best done by converting an internship. You can look at our guide to the prop trading interview process for a prop trading internship here.
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