Five elite niche quant internships offering crazy pay

No doubt that, if you're looking for an elite quant internship, you've looked at Jane Street and Citadel/Citadel Securities. The big firms have plenty of internships on offer, but there are equally coveted (and equally high-paying) roles available at smaller firms. These are some of them.

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Five Rings Capital - New York

Prop trading firm Five Rings is the largest (and thus, least niche) firm on this list, with ~250 staff. It compensates its full-time quant researchers very well, paying $300k salaries, and its interns are also paid well above the market. Applications are open for a January 2026 quant trading internship in New York, which pays $5,750 per week ($23k in total). Data from Levels.fyi suggests the firm also offers big sign-on bonuses; a verified internship offer from 2023 featured a $15k bonus.

Five Rings also has multiple graduate roles available across its London, Boca Raton, New York and Amsterdam offices. Figures for average total compensation (TC) at the firm aren't available, but in its UK subsidiary, 20 staff earned $1.05m per head in 2023 according to Companies House accounts.

Getting in isn't easy. On the r/Quant subreddit, candidates described the interview process as "brutal" and harder than many of the major firms, including Jane Street. It is thought to involve answering a series of complex probability and statistics questions, having only 30–60 seconds to answer each one.

It won't be quite so brutal if you make it in. Reviews for the firm on jobs forum Blind say it has "great work-life balance for the industry," and is full of "fun, smart young people."

Quadrature Capital - London

Quadrature is an AI trading firm paying London quant development interns New York rates. Verified figures aren't available, but Levels.fyi suggests the firm pays £3,980 ($5,138) per week.  Its full-time staff previously earned a staggering £3.6m ($4.65m) per head in 2022, although pay dropped to a 'measly' £2.46m ($3.18m) in 2023.

Quadrature's culture is a bit of an enigma. Insiders have previously described it as intentionally cultlike; facilites and benefits are thought to be abnormally high quality to keep staff happy and prevent them from leaving. This may only be of relevance if you're able to convert your internship to a full-time gig, however. 

There isn't a singular profile of intern hires at Quadrature. Ex-interns come from a variety of top universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick, with degrees ranging from undergraduate to PhD. Some had previous internships at the likes of Goldman Sachs, Google and XTX Markets. Some had no internships at all. Quadrature says it "proactively look[s] for people that might not have considered a career in quantitative finance," but says coding expertise is a must for quant developer roles.

Quadrature outlines its general hiring process on its website. While it varies from role to role, it will usually feature multiple rounds of collaborative on-site interviews where you work with a Quadrature employee on technical case studies. The hiring process for Quadrature interns takes place between September and December each year. 

Voloridge Investment Management - Jupiter

It's not just Ken Griffin hiring quants in Florida. 2 hours up the road at Jupiter, Palm Beach County, David Vogel is hiring interns for his quantitative hedge fund, Voloridge. Job listings for these internships say that you will earn "exceptionally high compensation," in addition to working five minutes from the beach. 

Interns reviewing the fund on Glassdoor praised its "good work culture" and high salaries.  Verified pay information isn't disclosed, but Levels.fyi suggests PhD quants can earn ~5.3k per week. Interns are divided on the location; unlike Miami, Jupiter is thought to be a popular retirement destination with an older population. Nielsberg Research estimates the average age in the town is 47.3 compared to 39.7 for Miami. 

Voloridge may be the hedge fund of choice for the climate conscious quant. Vogel and his family were forced to temporarily vacate the town in 2017 when Hurricane Irma hit, and he has since ramped up his sustainability efforts through his co-owned climate foundation, VoLo. 

Voloridge says you'll be working "bleeding edge machine learning techniques," and machine learning experience seems valuable to the firm, be it within or outside of finance. Vogel famously got his first hedge fund job after impressing hedge fund manager Jaffray Woodriff during a machine learning coding competition ran by Netflix.

Radix Trading - Chicago

According to Levels.fyi, Chicago-based low-latency trading firm Radix is the top paying firm in the world for interns, offering a weekly salary of $7.3k. It doesn't have a page for its internships right now, but the firm is currently hiring for a 6-month training program aimed at masters and PhD graduates. While HFT tends to shy away from overly academic types, Radix says it's "built mostly from academia... not from other trading firms."

Reviews for the firm on Blind in 2025 call it "surprisingly kind" with no "toxic masculinity." They also praise the transparency of its tech stack and compensation structure, but note that it has limited growth opportunities. They also say that people work up 40-50 hour weeks on average.

In addition to quant researchers, Radix is recruiting graduate C++ developers and FPGA engineers. These roles, like quant research roles, all pay performance bonuses on a quarterly basis.

Spark Investment Management - New York

You're unlikely to find an internship like Spark Investment Management's anywhere else. Interns there earn a minimum of $45k for just two weeks of work. It's currently recruiting for PhD computer science interns and interns in 'strategic planning' (recruitment). 

Spark is very small and thought to almost never hire. Its most recent ADV form, filed just over a year ago, revealed the firm had 20 employees, nine of which were in investment advisory functions. An SEC filing last month revealed that, at the end of 2024 the firm had ~$20bn in assets-under-management. Outside of that, very little is known about Spark.

Despite its size, Spark says it receives thousands of applications per year. Its application process features several phone interviews and in-house interviews. Spark says it aims "to hire a high proportion" of those invited to its office, so getting to that stage will be very, very hard.

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