Electronic trading firm offering home working tempts banks' quants

If you want a hybrid job in electronic market making, your best bet isn't an electronic market maker... it's a fintech. Revolut is in the process of building out its market making team and appears to be maintaining its approach that people can work from wherever they prefer.

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Financial News says Revolut wants to become "the world's leading market maker," suggesting that it aspires to compete with the likes of Citadel Securities and Jane Street. Good luck to them.  Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky is no stranger to the trading floor; he recently claimed that he received a bonus of ~£500k in his first year as a Lehman Brothers trader.

We can already see at least six people working in Revolut's market making team. Four of those joined last year. The team shares Storonsky's appreciation for young talent; operations manager Shane Keane, a high-performance computing specialist who spent the last year as a graduate at Susquehanna but joined Revolut in September. Edoardo Busetti joined the firm directly as a graduate from Imperial College in 2021. Both state via social media that they're working in a hybrid capacity.

Fully remote roles also appear to be on offer. One software engineer based remotely in Dubai says he has been "developing a high-capacity market making platform for FX and crypto" for Revolut since July. The engineer specialises in Java and Scala, while open listings for quants in the market making team request experience with SQL, Python and R.

It's not clear who leads the team, but a strong case can be made for Levon Atanasyan. He joined in 2022 from Russian hedge fund Renaissance Capital, where he spent a decade and was a director in FX trading. The previous head, Anton Pasechnikov, spent two years at the hedge fund building a high-frequency commodities trading platform.

Revolut has been bringing in banking staff as well as hedge fund and HFT alums. Georgios Efstathopoulos, a senior market making quant researcher, was a contract quant across Credit Suisse, Barclays and Lloyds before joining Revolut. He says that he trades both fiat and cryptocurrencies. Ildar Sagitov, who joined as a data scientist in 2019 and is now a lead quant in the market making team, was a VP at Austrian bank Raiffeisen.

It's not clear how much Revolut is paying to its fledgling market makers, but top electronic trading talent isn't cheap. Susquehanna's Dublin office, from which Keane joined, paid 128 employees an average of $632.3k in 2023. Revolut's firmwide average pay was $64.7k that same year. Revolut has two current openings in the team, a PhD quant and a London-based algo trader, neither of which give salary ranges.

Revolut declined to comment.

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