2019 Q4 Summary
Q4 has been an interesting one for us. Despite a challenging overall environment, we remain extremely busy with no shortage of jobs to fill. While most banks continue to reduce headcount, some firms have reprioritized technology hiring and continue to seek talented technologists. In fact, we’ve seen salaries rising dramatically for top people this year, especially juniors. We’ve even had reports of salaries topping 7 figures at the top funds for individual contributors.
It’s notable that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two firms that generally parallel each other, are moving in opposite directions. Goldman is aggressively hiring engineers, while Morgan Stanley just announced 1500 layoffs with IT having been particularly hard hit.
The competition between banks, hedge funds, and technology companies for top people continues apace and is intensifying. Amazon may have pulled out of HQ2, but it recently announced plans to open a new office in New York. Google will add 7k jobs over the next decade, and you don’t have to do much Googling to find many other companies expanding hiring plans in NYC.
Overall the job market is strong, but if you’re in the market, the skills to polish are software engineering (hello LeetCode), not bond math.
Best Workplaces for Innovation
A common priority among the people I talk to is working at an innovative company and exposure to new technologies. Congratulations to Morgan Stanley for making Fast Company’s list of The 50 best workplaces for innovators.
It’s also worth nothing that Goldman is innovating as well. The build out of the Marquee platform is a significant priority, and the firm has embraced open source for one of its key platforms.
Opportunity in DevOps/SRE
The Stack Overflow 2019 Developer Survey is full of interesting information. One trend visible in the data and consistent with the needs of our clients is the demand for DevOps/SRE professionals. That demand is easily visible in the salary data. Note that DevOps is not ad hoc systems support. Google describes it as follows:
By “systems engineering,” we mean a discipline that takes a holistic approach to the connections between distinct software systems or services rather than either (1) the internals of how to build a piece of software, where software engineering has tended to concentrate as a field, or (2) how software artifacts are deployed onto specific hardware, which has been the historic domain of system administration. Instead, systems engineers view the collection of individual pieces, which may be built by many separate product development teams, as a whole with properties distinct from its components. SEs tend to focus on how to monitor services, identify and remove bottlenecks, manage and balance connections, handle data replication, ensure data resiliency, and so on.
And here's what Google looks for when Hiring Site Reliability Engineers.
There’s a real financial opportunity here for good engineers who are having a hard time cracking the top firms. These roles, requiring good dev skills coupled with an investigative mind-set and overall knowledge of systems, can be highly lucrative.
Real Industry Salary Data
I had a fun time playing with this salary data from publicly available H-1B filings. Although the data is limited to base salaries, we can draw some interesting conclusions. Note below includes NY data only:
Base salaries rising steadily
Citadel is a top payer as advertised (average 2016-2019)
There’s been exceptional growth at Two Sigma and Tower Research. Tower has had some challenges this year resulting in a significant layoff a couple of months ago.
Finally, here are the figures for the current year (through September)
Current Priorities
Note that some of the listings have been present for some time. These companies continue to hire, often looking for similar profiles.
FinTech
Lead Data Engineer – FinTech startup, growing quickly
Go/AWS/Javascript Engineer – FinTech startup, growing quickly
Numerate Python Developer/Strat – Successful Fintech past startup phase
Python Engineer – Trading systems
Java Engineer – Credit Fixed Income eTrading
Buy Side
Lead Convertibles QuantDev – C++/Python/Fixed Income or Equity exp - Leading HF
Dev Manager – Monitoring – Leading HF
Lead Engineer/Architect – Monitoring – Leading HF
Dev Manager – Reporting – Leading HF
Lead Engineer/Architect – Reporting – Leading HF
Team Lead Data Engineer – python/C++/Spark/Hadoop – Equities – Leading HF
Lead C++ Engineer – Fixed Income Market Making – Leading HF
Data Science QuantDev – Python - Startup asset manager
SRE – Leading HF
Java/Python Developer – Leading HF – Compliance Technology
Javascript/ReactJS Developer – Market data front-end – Large HF startup
Data Developer – Security Master SME – Leading HF
Data Developer – Scraping/Cleaning/Storing – Leading HF
Python Middleware Developer – Leading HF
DevOps - Kubernetes, containerization – Mid-size HF
Data Engineer – python/Spark/Hadoop – Commodities – Leading HF - Greenwich
Data Engineer – python/C++/Spark/Hadoop – Credit – Leading HF
Data Engineer – python/Java/Spark/Hadoop – Data Platform – Leading HF
QuantDev – C++/python - Fixed Income – Rates - Leading HF
C++ Engineer – Fixed Income Market Making – Leading HF
UI Engineer – React/Angular/Reduc/Node.js - Fixed Income Market Making – Leading HF
Low latency C++ Engineer – cross asset - Leading HF
Senior System Distributed Data Engineer – Cassandra/Kafka/Cloud/Big Data – Leading HF
Quantitative Research – Leading HF
Quantitative Research Engineering – Leading HF
Java Engineer – Trade Flow – Leading HF
Data Engineer – SQL Server, C#, MongoDB/Spark – Healthcare hedge fund / VC
Data Scientist - Python, SQL, R, C#, ML – Healthcare hedge fund / VC
Junior C#/ASP.Net DevOps developer – Healthcare hedge fund / VC
Systems Administrator – Princeton location
Sell Side
Java full-stack Developer – Fixed Income eTrading Strategies – leading IB
Java Developer – Credit Trading – leading IB
Java Developer – Securities Lending – leading IB
Java Developer – Loans Servicing – leading IB
Java Developer – Collateral management/optimization – leading IB
C++ - Mid-Senior Equity ETrading Platform Developer – leading IB
Python Developer - Equity eTrading Tooling and Instrumentation – leading IB
SRE – Equity eTrading – leading IB
DevOps – Runtime Platforms – leading IB
Javascript/ReactJS Developer – Strategic platforms – leading IB
Quant/Strat – Equity Fundamental Strategies – leading IB
And many others.