How to get a job in an electronic trading firm or HFT

11 August 2026

12 minute read

How to get a job in an electronic trading firm or HFT

Electronic trading firms are a new breed of financial services firm that, over the past decade, have grown into some of the most profitable and high-paying companies in the world.
Most people in electronic trading firms work as either quants, which build and deploy trading strategies, or engineers, who develop the systems and tools those quants use to trade.
Quants build models using statistical methods like linear regression or through machine learning techniques. AI advances and growing GPU clusters at these firms are making the latter option much more popular.
Some electronic trading firms are market makers, meaning they continually make trades in liquid markets without betting on the price of an asset rising or falling. They make money buy quoting slightly different prices to buyers and sellers.
At elite trading firms, employees are paid over $2m on average.

At the turn of the century, investment banks may have been the most exciting place to work in finance, full of young bright people earning ridiculous amounts of money. Today, that position in the market has arguably been taken by electronic or algorithmic trading firms, a fast rising group of companies that first rose to fame through Michael Lewis’ controversial book, ‘Flash Boys’. At the time, those firms were outsiders… now they’re heavyweights. But what does it take to work for them?

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What is an electronic trading firm? What is a HFT?

The electronic trading ecosystem is one large Venn diagram. There are various different ways of classifying them; each firm will be at least one of these, but it will likely be a combination of multiple:

What are High Frequency Trading Firms (HFTs)?

Electronic trading firms include HFTs. It’s from this bracket of firms that Lewis drew the Flash Boys moniker; they rely on their ultra-low-latency tech infrastructure to beat their competition to profitable trades by milliseconds, or even nanoseconds to maximize their profit. In recent years, there has also been a rise in medium-frequency trading strategies, which are often more complex, less reliant on pure speed, and involve holding positions for hours to days at a time.

What are electronic market makers?

Market making is perhaps the most common strategy in the electronic trading space. Market making means that a firm provides constant liquidity to a market; this used to be done by banks, so modern market makers are sometimes instead called 'non-banking liquidity providers.' They can make markets in fractions of seconds, as HFTs, or do so more slowly. Rather than making a long or short bet on the value of an instrument changing like a hedge fund would, these firms make a massive amount of trades, quoting buyers and sellers different prices, and profiting from the ‘spread’ or difference between the two prices.The profit margins are small but these firms trade billions in volume… so it adds up.

What are prop trading firms?

The biggest difference between electronic trading firms and hedge funds is that most of these firms trade using their own money rather than trading on behalf of clients. In other words they trade "proprietary" money or "prop." This means they don’t face the same scrutiny over performance from clients so they can benefit from riskier or longer-term strategies. Some firms, like Tower Research, have opened themselves up to external capital.

Who are the biggest electronic trading firms?

The three biggest players in the electronic trading space are Jane Street, Citadel Securities and Hudson River Trading. Last year, Jane Street generated a surreal $39.6bn in net trading revenues while the other two firms each generated ~$12bn. Other major players include the Dutch trading houses, IMC and Optiver, as well as British trading firms like Quadrature and XTX Markets.

What do jobs in electronic trading firms involve?

There are broadly two types of people hired for the majority of roles in electronic trading: quants and engineers.

Quant Researchers/Traders are the ones that analyze data and find trading strategies with ‘alpha,’ i.e. returns that outperform the market on average. In a more traditional firm, quant researchers would develop statistical or machine learning models, quant developers would write the algorithms that codify these models into actionable trading signals and traders would monitor active trading strategies and assess changes to market risk. In a prop trading firm, you're more likely to be doing all of these at once.

In firms like Optiver, the titles of trader and researcher are interchangeable. Other firms like Jane Street separate them into distinct functions which collaborate on projects. They also go by other names; Hudson River Trading calls its trading staff algorithm developers while Quadrature calls them quant developers

One of the most popular trading strategies in electronic trading is statistical arbitrage. This strategy aims to capitalize on temporary pricing differences between two financial instruments that are intrinsically linked. Mean reversion, another popular strategy, involves using available data to estimate a fair market value for a given asset. You buy when an asset is below that value and sell when it rises above.

Market making works similarly to mean reversion but generally on a more micro scale. Traders will estimate the fair value of an asset, accepting sell offers below that value then selling it on to bids above it. Estimating that fair value is integral to whether the market maker will make or lose money; if their value is too far above the asset’s true value, they will end up accumulating inventory of that asset due to an abundance of sellers and a lack of buyers at their desired price. In markets with a lot of competition, traders need to keep quotes close to that fair value while also making their offer more attractive to a buyer/seller than a rival market maker, which is where the real difficulty comes in.

Last month, an options market making trader at Citadel Securities told us about an average day at work for her. She usually spends an hour before market open in team meetings discussing risk, the firm’s performance and recent news that affects trading strategies. Her busiest trading period is the morning, when the market opens, and once that period cools off she conducts some independent research and backtests some strategies. After market close, there’s more meetings and more project work.

Engineers have a very different experience. Their job is to build the infrastructure on which quants execute trades. This can be lower-level infrastructure like execution engines, or it can be higher-level tools and features that traders or fellow developers use directly.

The kind of technologies and programming languages you’ll use vary by role and firm. Engineers developing tools might use Python for the functionality alongside React or Javascript for the UI. Infrastructure engineers are usually expected to use C++, the gold standard for low latency programming, but some firms have their own favourites. Jane Street has its staff use OCaml, although it doesn’t expect them to have used the language before joining..

Rather than operating around the trading cycle, engineers make continuous improvements to their codebase through a series of releases (in which new code is put into production) across the day. A Citadel Securities UI developer told us in 2024 that the firm can have up to three releases per day.

This doesn’t mean that engineers don’t have extra duties when the market is open. Some engineers, particularly those working on technology closest to the traders themselves, have to be on hand to firefight if they encounter a bug. Some firms have ‘production engineers’ whose primary role is to support those firefighting efforts.

It’s not all about engineers and traders though. Other jobs in electronic trading firms include business development staff who work on a range of tasks from recruitment through to alternative data sourcing. Bigger firms who run robust internship programs also have campus recruitment teams who focus on finding the brightest young graduates and convincing them to join.

There's also an increasingly prominent contingent of hardware specialists working at these firms, like engineers that design the physical premises of their datacentres. They also hire researchers that design the powerful semiconductor chips through which they execute trades. The most popular chips in the space are FPGAs, ASICs and GPUs. FPGAs and ASICs are both highly specialized chips that perform the task they're programmed to do at unparalleld speeds; the difference is that FPGAs can be reprogrammed for another use while ASICs (which are slightly faster) cannot. These need specialists in hardware engineering languages like Verilog in order to run. GPUs are more general purpose but work particularly well for machine learning strategies; trading firms have built GPU clusters with thousands, or even tens of thousands of GPUs because of this.

What does it take to get an internship or graduate job in an electronic trading firm?

The way most people get into electronic trading is through the campus recruiting programs run by these firms. The likes of Jane Street and Citadel Securities run global programs, hiring across London, New York, Hong Kong and more. Several lesser known firms like Radix Trading and Five Rings also run internship programs, although these tend to be localised around their main office.

To get a graduate job, you’ll probably need to get an internship. These have acceptance rates as low as 0.1% and vary in their structure depending on the role you apply for. One Optiver engineer said that the interview process there consists of an online assessment, a technical screening call, two more complex technical interviews and a behavioural interview at the end.

Trading interviews can be more obtuse. These firms famously ask confusing, long-winded or fantastical interview questions designed to test candidates’ quick thinking. You’ll often be presented with a game revolving around coins, dice or cards, and you’ll have to formulate the optimal strategy to maximize profit. The interviewer will often make adjustments to the rules or change the context and see how you adapt your answer; they’ll also point out errors that you’ve made and watch to see if you’ve learned from them in subsequent answers.

There are alternate routes into an electronic trading firm. Optiver runs a ‘Kickstarter’ program which is a spring week/bootcamp hybrid that can result in a full-time job offer. IMC Trading runs a global trading competition, Prosperity, which puts the winners in front of electronic trading recruiters and usually leads to either internships or job offers for top performers.

What qualifications do you need for a job in electronic trading?

Electronic trading firms don’t demand a specific archetype, and are always on the hunt for unusual talent, but most people in the space have a STEM background. Engineers tend to be computer science grads whereas quants and traders tend to be mathematicians. Graduates from top schools like MIT and Oxford tend to be the most common, but you won’t be hired purely because of what school you attended.

Despite the deeply technical nature of the industry, postgraduate education might harm your chances of joining these firms, as they want impressionable young people that can be moulded around their respective cultures. PhDs are still desired for specialist roles like hardware engineers working on FPGAs, and graduates of top Master’s in Financial Engineering (MFE) courses can also be valuable.

How is AI changing careers in electronic trading?

AI is nothing new in the world of electronic trading. Firms have been running machine learning strategies since before OpenAI and Anthropic even existed, but it’s the scale and scope of its use that has ballooned since modern AI technologies became widespread.

For example, natural language processing could always be used to assess sentiment and search for signals in smaller pieces of text data, but LLMs allow those principles to be applied to significantly larger datasets and can extract much richer insights. Trading firms are building fleets of thousands of GPUs and developing various global datacentres to enhance their AI capabilities.

In terms of day-to-day work, ex-high frequency trader Annanay Kapila told us it’s making the best people “super productive,” and is elevating employees that provide "genuine, idiosyncratic human alpha.” At a junior level, trading firms are worried that core coding skills are being lost due to the use of AI coding tools.

How much do electronic trading firms pay?

The top electronic trading firms pay a lot of money. Jane Street and Citadel Securities both paid their staff an average of over $2m in 2025. This is predominantly paid via bonuses, given that average salaries in the US for these two firms are each under $300k according to H1B visa filings.

The structure of your pay will vary from firm to firm. Jane Street and Optiver offer a profit share scheme, meaning they pay bonuses in line with the profits of the firm. At Jane Street, pay has been described as “a bit communist,” as top performers don’t have full visibility into their performance and may have been paid a lower proportion of their PnL compared to less successful traders. Optiver, instead, has a marble system, where top performers earn marbles that correlate to a small percentage of the firm’s total profits. Citadel Securities pays more traditional performance-based bonuses.

Junior roles in electronic trading are also some of the most lucrative in the world. A PhD intern at Optiver can earn up to $90k (including salary and sign-on bonus) for an eight-week internship. Many of the top firms offer weekly pay of ~$5.8k before bonuses.

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