Laid off Meta and Big Tech juniors will have a hard time fleeing to finance
There's a lot of technical staff, voluntarily and otherwise, looking for new jobs right now. Banking engineers and quants are evaluating their options after poor bonuses, while employees from Big Tech firms like Meta are looking for new roles after layoffs. At algorithmic trading and buy-side firms, the latter cohort might have a hard time.
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A quant trading headhunter in APAC, speaking anonymously, said it's becoming less common for funds and electronic trading firms to hire junior staff from Silicon Valley. Instead, he says they're looking at people who are "highly technical, capable, and experienced from specific desks on the sell side." Reliance on either pool of talent is also diminishing. As the high and medium-frequency trading sector matures, firms are increasingly growing their own talent in-house, or hiring from rivals.
Some engineers from big tech are still wanted by trading firms, though. Christie Doderer, a London-based buy-side technology headhunter for RLS Search, says "a lot of firms have big AI initiatives" and are hiring "PhD level people from good tech companies" for those particular roles. Doderer says "You don’t often need people with financial knowledge when it comes to AI" as the focus is on "research and idea generation." Google and DeepMind staff, for example, have been spotted popping up at hedge funds. Doderer says other roles where people from Big Tech are likely to cross over are "infrastructure roles, particularly for networking, and cybersecurity."
The appeal of Big Tech engineers in finance might further wane in the future. Hedge fund Man Group's co-head of front office engineering said last year that students who were once applying for internships in FAANG are applying to hedge funds now instead.
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