Secretive quant fund paying $45k for two-week internships

If you think the most lucrative place to intern in quant finance is one of the big-name hedge funds, you're sorely mistaken. Spark Investment Management, a New York hedge fund is offering $45k for internships lasting just two weeks, equivalent to a yearly salary of...$1.17m.

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Spark is hiring computer science interns and strategic planning interns, each receiving the $45k for two weeks. The former will be involved in building greenfield data infrastructure, while the latter will (curiously) be involved in hiring talent for the fund. 

The strategic planning interns are Spark's current priority. It's accepting applicants from undergraduate and above. The computer science internship is only looking for students studying PhDs. The roles do not require a particular field of study. There's no deadline and no specific internship date; Spark says it will "work around your schedule to determine your best two weeks."

Spark is a quantitative hedge fund which is thought to have over $390m in assets under management, trading most asset classes, including FX, equities, and commodities, as well as derivatives in FX and cryptocurrency. It was founded in 1994 by Peter Laventhol; he is thought to be the first ever employee at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, but struck out on his own. Today, the fund has 20 full-time employees according to its most recent SEC filing, nine of which work in investment advisory functions. 

People are very secretive about having worked at Spark. Those we know include Dean Rubine, a former Bell Labs researcher, who joined the firm as director of technology back in its first year from Carnegie Mellon's research faculty. Rafe Kinsey, a PhD mathematician, spent four years in Spark's strategic development team after joining as a graduate, and has since gone on to work in Jane Street's finance team.

Spark says a third of its employees have PhDs, and that it has hired mathematics Olympiad gold medalists and ex-Carnegie Hall soloists.

The fund is thought to hire only from select universities; this year, it is only visiting Harvard, Princeton and MIT, but has visited Cornell, Yale and the University of Michigan in the past.

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