Why DE Shaw is considered the most rewarding employer in financial services
Our Ideal Employer report for 2025 is out. Based on over 15,000 votes in our Ideal Employer survey it shows where people in financial services most want to work.
Respondents to our survey were asked to rate their favoured employer on the following metrics, with their aggregate score across these statements nominating the employer with the most "rewarding career."
- This company offers interesting work.
- This company is good for innovation.
- This company offers work with meaning.
This year, that employer is D.E. Shaw.
DE Shaw is a multistrategy hedge fund known for its focus on quantitative investment strategies. The firm scored particularly impressively among our voters for its perceived level of innovation and novelty of its workload. This is the first time that D.E. Shaw won this category, which was won by KPMG in 2024 and Rothschild in 2023.
D.E. Shaw has over 2,500 employees globally, and $65bn in assets under management. It was famously founded above a book store in New York. Founder Dr David Shaw, who led the firm from 1986 to 2001, left to found a “computational biochemistry” lab, D.E Shaw Research. D.E. Shaw is less well known than similarly sized rivals such as Citadel and Millennium, but has a strong reputation within the hedge fund industry itself.
Second-place Renaissance Technologies (RenTech) scored highly for its innovation and interesting work. Like DE Shaw, RenTech is a hedge fund focused on quantitative strategies and is known for hiring some of the world’s best scientists. Its website boasts about having “90 PhDs in mathematics, physics, computer science, and related fields” in its staff.
Fintech firm Binance ranked third for rewarding careers. Binance has no fixed headquarters, and its founder and longtime CEO, Changpeng Zhao, was jailed for four months last year for money laundering. In May this year, Zhao was appointed as an advisor to Kyrgyzstan’s president, Sadyr Japarov, advising on the development of digital assets.
There was a diverse mix of employers in the ranking for rewarding careers, including four hedge funds, three fintechs, two banks, and one market intelligence provider (S&P). There is not one single industry that is clearly considered the most interesting or innovative.
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