Prop-trading firms and hedge funds like Point72, Balyasny, and Bridgewater are turning to AI for higher returns. Here's what they pay AI workers.
- Tech savvy hedge funds are investing in generative AI by hiring top talent.
- Business Insider collected salary data from 8 hedge funds and prop-trading firms for AI roles.
- See who is paying the most at firms like Bridgewater, Two Sigma, Jane Street, and more.
For years, hedge funds and prop-trading firms have relied on massive amounts of data and the workers who analyze it to beat the market.
But the promise of generative AI has kicked off a new talent war for AI workers who can level up hedge funds' quantitative strategies with a new generation of transformative technology. Firms are hiring AI experts to sit within their trading teams and on teams dedicated to building and deploying AI tools.
Firms are looking to use the technology to increase worker productivity, but above all, their goal is to drive better investment returns. Some, like Bridgewater Associates, have even developed an "artificial investor" to manage clients' money, while others are using the technology to create more accurate and complex models to test their investment theories.
Hedge funds and prop trading firms, privately owned firms that excel at high-speed market making and hedge-fund-style quant trading strategies, are willing to pay for these workers, but so are companies across the economy. As a result, these workers aren't cheap, but there's also not a lot of data about how much they stand to get paid in this corner of the financial sector.
To get a look at these secretive firms' AI hiring practices, Business Insider pulled data from the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification's 2023 disclosure data for H1-B and similar visa holders for hedge funds and prop trading firms. We pulled data for roles containing keywords like "AI," "machine learning," and "prompt."
This data shows the salaries that hedge funds expect to pay foreign AI workers in 2023, and its disclosure is part of their visa terms. This data does not include signing or performance bonuses or stock-based compensation, but it is the best publicly available data on base pay at these firms, which are known for doling out bonuses for personal and fund performance.
BI also analyzed recent job listings at major hedge fund and prop trading firms to identify what they're paying AI workers. New state laws in places like New York require job listings to include a range of salaries offered for the role, providing further insight into AI workers' salaries.
Most firms declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment.
Check out the visa and job listing salaries below. The firms are listed in alphabetical order.
Balyasny went all-in on generative AI when it named its first-ever head of applied AI in November 2023. Ever since then, Charlie Flanagan and his team have built a slew of tools for PMs and business teams.
Some use cases help cut down time spent on repetitive tasks, like a two-day process of putting together a monthly analysis, which now takes about 30 minutes, Flanagan previously told BI. Other applications are designed to proactively push relevant information, sometimes even before workers know they should be asking the question.
Flanagan said the goal is to build a series of bots that, together, can mimic the work of a senior analyst.
Balyasny had one recent job posting related to AI:
Data quality analyst: $115,000-$170,000
The firm also provided BI with a list of salaries paid for recent hires at the following roles:
Senior AI researcher: $250,000-$350,000
AI researcher: $200,000-$300,000
Lead AI engineer: $250,000-$300,000
AI engineer: $175,000-$225,000
The world's largest hedge fund is on track to replicate every step of the investment process with AI and machine learning, co-chief investment officer Greg Jensen previously told BI.
The effort is being led by the firm's Artificial Investment Associate (AIA) Labs, helmed by chief scientist Jasjeet Sekhon. His team, a mix of investors and machine-learning scientists, is on a mission to build and train AI models that can understand global financial and economic patterns, create investment theories, plug those theories into machine-learning models, and test if the theories check out.
The end goal is to have an "artificial investor" to invest clients' money in a fund slated to launch this summer.
We were able to find one AI salary in the visa data, a machine learning research engineer who will be paid between $210,000-$350,000.
Ultra-secretive D.E. Shaw is known for its academic heft. The New York-based firm, which manages more than $60 billion, boasts on its website that 85 investment professionals hold doctorate degrees, and its staff has won 24 International Math Olympiad medals.
The firm's quantitative chops have been its calling card, though there are discretionary portfolio managers managing credit, macro, and private market books as well. The firm is known to pay well, and its recent AI job posting — for a machine-learning developer — lists an annual salary range of $250,000 to $350,000.
Jane Street — which made $10.6 billion in net trading revenue last year and $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2024 — is the juggernaut of the secretive breed of proprietary trading shops, privately owned firms that excel at high-speed market making as well as hedge-fund style quant trading strategies. They're known for building state-of-the-art technology and data processing capabilities, so it's no surprise they're competing for the best talent in artificial intelligence.
The firm was founded in 2000 and is known for a distinct culture and relatively minimal employee turnover. It has no CEO or official management committee, but instead "resembles an anarchist commune, informally led by a group of 30 or 40 senior executives," according to the FT. Jane Street pays generously, but it's also less meritocratic than some peers, with comp more spread out than an "eat what you kill" hedge fund model.
Check out the firm's recent AI job postings below:
Machine learning engineer: $250,000-$300,000
Machine learning performance engineer: $250,000-$300,000
Machine learning researcher: $250,000-$300,000
Like Jane Street, Jump Trading is known for secrecy and being on the technological vanguard. In its pursuit of trading connections approaching light speed, it has invested in fiber-optic cables, microwave towers, and hollow-core glass tubes. Jump has been at the forefront of embracing crypto business opportunities — it covertly launched those efforts 2015 — both in trading and investing in startups.
Jump competes to hire the most talented engineers and quant researchers in the world and pays them well — and it is also known to discourage them from leaving by imposing 2-year noncompete clauses.
BI was able to find one recent AI Job posting for an AI research scientist who will be paid between $200,000-$300,000.
Izzy Englander's hedge fund grew its AI team with some key hires at the end of 2023. Millennium hired Gideon Mann, its global head of AI, from Bloomberg, where he drove machine-learning products and research. At Millennium, Mann will work closely with Chief Information Officer Vlad Torgovnik to build and lead an AI advisory group. He will collaborate with AI experts and teams across the firm to share findings and advise on AI initiatives.
Millennium's AI bench is strengthened by Mike Purewal, who builds AI tools for the firm's equities investors. Purewal came to Millennium from Bank of America, where he designed and implemented AI models across equities sales and trading.
The firm has one recent AI job listing for a full stack engineer - infrastructure AI that will be paid between $175,000-$250,000.
Billionaire Steve Cohen is best known for his bread-and-butter stocking-picking skills and the teams of equity investors he's hired over the years at Point72. But the owner of MLB's New York Mets is also known to dabble in the latest trends, making bets on different crypto ventures and bitcoin, for example.
At his Connecticut-based firm, artificial intelligence roles run the gamut across different teams. According to H-1B data, the firm was hiring for an applied AI researcher role focused on technology innovation for $180,000.
Other job postings, listed below, show other titles, including a machine-learning research internship with an annualized salary in the six figures.
Job Listings:
AI product lead, investment services: $400,000
Machine learning researcher - intern: $150,000-$200,000 (annualized)
Machine learning researcher: $175,000-$250,000
Quantitative Researcher - Machine Learning: $150,000-$200,000
Data scientist, proprietary research: $125,000-$150,000
Data engineer, proprietary research: $160,000-$220,000
As a quantitative hedge fund, Two Sigma is no stranger to using mathematical and computer-based models to generate investment ideas. However advancements in generative AI have opened up a new world of possibilities for the fund's researchers, allowing them to test new theories using the latest AI models.
At the forefront of this work is Mike Schuster, head of the AI core team at Two Sigma, whose team of AI researchers is focused on solving some of the firm's toughest machine-learning problems. Schuster joined Two Sigma in 2018 from Google, where he worked for 12 years and led foundational research on the renowned Google Brain team, which was behind some of the tech giant's biggest AI breakthroughs, like Google Translate.
Check out the salaries the firm is paying for two potential visa hires, as well as recent job postings below:
Visa Data:
AI research scientist: $215,000-$250,000
AI research: $250,000
Job listings:
AI research scientist: $165,000-$300,000
Quantitative software engineer: high-performance algorithms and techniques: $165,000 - $325,000
Quantitative researcher: machine learning - news & insights: $165,000-$325,000
Quantitative researcher: machine learning: $165,000-$325,000
Quantitative researcher - macro features, forecasting, and management: $165,000-$325,000
Quantitative researcher - full-time campus hire: $200,000 (Bachelors), $205,000 (Masters), and $220,000 (PhD)