Extreme-elite candidates invited to compete for jobs at top electronic trading firm

It’s not easy to get a quantitative research job at XTX Markets, the electronic trading firm that pays its staff an average of around £244k per head. Despite accounting for 7.4% of global foreign exchange trades, XTX only has around 100 employees. Plenty of people want to work there. "Our hiring of quant researchers is extremely selective and we often find ourselves sieving through tens of very good candidates to find the exceptional candidates,” said XTX Market’s Founder & Co-CEO, Dr. Alex Gerko. 

For its next hiring round, therefore, XTX is trying something different.

The firm, which operates across the equities, FX, fixed income and commodities markets, and describes itself as ‘a quantitative-driven electronic market-maker,’ is launching a competition to find five statisticians who can build models to predict movements in the market.

XTX doesn’t just want elite statisticians – it wants the elite of the elite. Gerko says the competition will differentiate "great talent" from "best-in-the-world talent.”

The competition, which opens today, can be entered here. Candidates, who are expected to be PhD-level statisticians, will be asked to pass an initial technical assessment before developing and uploading their own stock market prediction model based on training data provided by XTX. A team from XTX will also compete in the competition by submitting their own model.

The deadline for entries is 30 September, but XTX says it will be interviewing promising candidate throughout the duration of the competition (suggesting that those five spaces may be filled early on).

There’s $100k in prize money for top submissions. $30k will be awarded to anyone who can beat the firm’s entry. The remaining prize money, all of which will be allocated at the end, will be split between the top five entrants.

XTX is also known for its fancy London office which includes a replica Apollo 11 landing capsule equipped with games consoles. 

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