HFTs and electronic trading firms: Who they hire and what they do

Electronic trading firms aren’t a niche any more. Firms like Jane Street and Hudson River Trading brought in tens of billions of dollars of revenues in 2025, and are continuing to grow. However, while interest in the industry has risen, it's still infamously opaque.

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To get a job in electronic trading, you need to know exactly what kinds of firms there are, what they trade and who they hire. Below is a guide to all of that, with compensation information thrown in for good measure. 

What kinds of electronic trading firms are there? 

High Frequency Trading Firms (HFTs) 

The most famous kind of electronic trading firm was immortalized by Michael Lewis’ book, Flash Boys. As the name suggests, HFT is all about executing quantitative strategies faster than your competitors. How fast? Firms are optimizing their trades to a picosecond level using extremely fine-tuned code in order to get an edge on their rivals.

HFT was massively popular in the 2010s but has become less prominent at the major firms recently, as the infrastructure is very expensive and there are hundreds of smaller HFTs saturating the space and curbing profits. 

Medium Frequency Trading Firms (MFTs) 

Most of the major electronic trading firms will do both HFT and MFT in some capacity. While HFT looks for arbitrage opportunities on a picosecond basis, MFT strategies usually involve holding positions from minutes to days at a time.

Electronic Market Making Firms 

Also known as a Non-Banking Liquidity Provider (NBLP), these firms execute a massive number of trades in their chosen asset classes every day, making sure buyers can always buy and sellers can always sell. 

NBLPs make their money by quoting buyers and sellers marginally different prices and pocketing the difference. They do this at extremely high volumes; Citadel Securities, for example, accounts for roughly 35% of US equities trading volume.

When trading ETFs, these kinds of firms will sometimes buy or short the component stocks to hedge their risk.

Prop Trading Firms 

Prop trading firms are electronic trading firms that execute their strategies using their own money, rather than using the money of clients like a bank or hedge fund. These firms have more freedom and less scrutiny on their strategies from investors, but that comes with its own risks.

Many of the biggest names in electronic trading are prop firms, but as they grow, these firms are also starting to take on investors. Jane Street, for example, trades with both client money and its own funds.

A lot of the biggest firms fit all of these descriptors at once, but some only fit one or two. Using one of the labels below to describe all firms would be wrong. But who are the biggest firms and what do they do?

Jane Street

Who? The poster child of algorithmic trading. Jane Street fits all of the above descriptors, and has a hedge fund attached for good measure. The New York-based firm also has offices in London, Chicago, Hong Kong and Singapore, and is opening another in Abu Dhabi.

Jane Street operates a number of different strategies across different asset classes. Most notably, it found itself in hot water last year over a strategy in the Indian options market, in which it would buy large amounts of an ETF while shorting the component stocks, then selling its position around the time of expiry. Jane Street has also ramped up its machine learning operations in recent years, amassing a fleet of over 500 GPUs.

Hiring? Jane Street says it has over 3,000 employees, up from ~2,600 in October. The firm’s biggest driver for trading staff recruitment is its internship and graduate program; it hires hundreds of interns globally per year and converts those into graduate traders. Top schools in its most recent cohort were Stanford and the University of Chicago. MIT is a historic favourite, and it has a close relationship with the University of Cambridge. Jane Street also makes senior hires; recently, given increased scrutiny from regulators, it has been beefing up its legal team with ex-investment banking MDs. 

Jane Street has historically not been a huge fan of PhDs, but that might be changing as its ML team grows.  Recent machine learning researcher hires include ex-Meta researcher Guy Davidson in New York and ex-Microsoft applied scientist Jonathan Armond in London. Both have PhDs from New York University and Warwick, respectively.

Jane Street has been expanding its office footprint in multiple regions. It is reportedly doubling its London office space and is expanding its Hong Kong office to six floors, up from 2.5 floors in 2024.

Pay? In 2024, Jane Street paid an average of $1.4m to its employees. Full-year figures for last year aren’t available, but it’s likely much, much more. In the third quarter of last year alone, it spent upwards of $600k on employee compensation. Not everyone was earning over $1m… some were earning much more. In Jane Street’s UK entity, LLP partners earned $19.6m on average.

Jane Street’s interns are also well compensated. The firm’s 2024 cohort reportedly earned $64k over 11 weeks, and the firm has increased the base pay for interns since then by $1k a week.

Jane Street’s pay structure is slightly controversial, however. It has been described as ‘communist’ for basing bonuses on the performance of the firm as a whole rather than the performance of the individual. Despite this, Jane Street’s traders are notoriously loyal and few ever leave.

Susquehanna International Group (SIG) 

Who? SIG is the largest major HFT and one of the most well-known. It’s an algorithmic trader and market maker based in Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia, but also has offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Stamford and Palm Beach and elsewhere. It’s also famous for being where Jane Street’s founders got their start.

In addition to traditional asset classes like equities, FX and derivatives, SIG also trades crypto, and is public about some of its more peculiar bets, including a quantitative sports trading business. It was one of the earliest trading firms to profess its appreciation of the burgeoning asset class of prediction market event contracts.

Hiring? The biggest HFT naturally has a large number of openings. At the time of writing, there are 177 full-time openings at the firm, 36 of which are for graduates, and it also has 28 internships and co-ops available. Technology roles greatly outnumber quantitative trading and research roles for full-time positions, but student roles are quant-focused.

Recent senior hires include two FPGA engineers from cinema technology manufacturer Blackmagic. It also appears to be growing its Chinese presence, it hired ex-UBS sales trader Patrick Zhu as a business development manager in Shanghai.

Pay? Pay often fluctuates at HFT firms, but is usually impressive. In SIG’s European HQ of Dublin, pay averaged $686k in 2024 according to Companies House. This was up from the year before but a steep decline on 2022; in the 13 months ending December 2022, the entity paid an average of $1.1m. 

In the US, pay isn’t always as high as other big names. On the H1B visa salary database, staff earned an average base pay of $120k. Its internship roles pay much more competitively.

Optiver 

Who? The European powerhouse of this list, Optiver is an Amsterdam-based market maker and prop trading firm and that has been around since 1986. It's well known for being one of the more prolific hirers of hardware engineers working with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as well as traditional software-based quant developers and researchers. It primarily makes markets in equities, FX, fixed income and commodities.

Hiring? In its most recent annual report (2024), Optiver revealed that it grew its headcount by ~150 to 2,112 employees and hired 299 interns. The firm is growing fast, with 140 openings for experienced staff and 15 internships. Shanghai is a notable growth area; it has 6 internships and 20 full-time openings in the region.

Optiver’s most notable senior hire last year was its new CTO, Lance Braunstein, who most recently headed engineering for Blackrock’s portfolio management system, Aladdin. In 2026, it has hired a chief data and AI architect, Merouane Moakil, from quant hedge fund Two Sigma.

Pay? The big appeal at Optiver is a chance to be involved in the firm’s profit sharing initiative for its quants. An Optiver employee via jobs forum Blind said in 2023 that the firm issues “marbles” to its traders based on performance, each marble corresponding to a certain percentage of total firm PnL. Marble allotment is “very meritocratic” but, as it corresponds to total firm PnL rather than your own performance, bonuses might underwhelm in disappointing years. Pay at its UK office averaged £467.4k ($639.4k) for its 133 employees.

Jump Trading 

Who? A stalwart of HFT, Jump is a prop trading firm currently led by ex-JPMorgan MD Dave Olson, who serves as president and CIO. 

The firm historically dominated the US fixed income market, but was one of the HFT firms most bullish on crypto, spinning out a division to trade it. The FTX scandal caused a number of issues in that department; a subsidiary of the firm recently received a $123m fine over failed stablecoin TerraUSD, for example. It’s slowly creeping back into crypto after licking its wounds, and is also making markets on prediction market platform Kalshi.

Hiring? Jump had around 350 employees back in 2017, now it has more than 2000. It’s hiring in 13 locations, including London, Chicago and Singapore. It's hiring for 15 internships, six graduate roles and 47 experienced positions. Jump has some peculiar roles, like its ‘weekend warriors’ who can work potential 4-day weeks. 

In 2026, senior hires include Tomsilav Gracin, a former quant developer at Quadrature. Last month, it also hired Leighton Symons as a quant research and trading partner; he previously headed experienced quant strat recruitment at Goldman Sachs, and was most recently head of Two Sigma’s academic partnerships program.

Pay? Jump Trading's UK arm paid an average of $659.5k to employees in 2024, down from $795k the previous year. This is likely due to an increase in back office headcount as the front office stayed largely flat.

Some people earn more than that. In a 2023 legal dispute, it was revealed that quant trader Damian Couture earned a total compensation of over £1m ($1.36m) in his first year, including a £350k signing bonus and a £500k guaranteed bonus.

Hudson River Trading 

Who? Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a prop trader and liquidity provider for US equities and ETFs that was founded by a group of MIT and Harvard graduates in 2002. It currently has 15 offices, more than half of which are in the US, in cities such as Seattle, Boulder and its New York headquarters. It has opened multiple new offices over the past few years including locations in Hong Kong, Seattle and Seoul.

The firm is thought to be a lot more engineer-oriented than the likes of Jane Street, so much so that its traders and quants are often referred to as ‘algorithm developers.’ HRT was also one of the earliest HFTs to branch out into medium-frequency trading; the firm’s head of AI, Iain Dunning, said on a podcast last October that MFT is now “a big part of our business,” and distanced himself from the notion that HRT is a pure HFT firm.

Hiring? Bloomberg reported in December that HRT had 1,150 employees, up from 900 in 2024. It currently has 53 global openings, including one summer internship.

HRT is diversifying who it hires, having previously focused on hiring mathematics and engineering whiz-kids. Bloomberg reported that it’s also looking at people with better discretionary skillsets and academics from AI research firms like DeepMind. 

Senior hires in 2026 include David Zderic, formerly Citadel Securities APAC head of low latency trading, who joined this month as an algo developer.

Pay? In HRT’s UK entities, it paid 152 employees an average of £652k ($891k) in 2024. Entities that employed the firm’s trading and research staff both earned above £944k ($1.3m) on average.

The firm is a particularly lucrative place to work as a junior software engineer. According to Levels.fyi, entry-level engineers at HRT earn $400k in average total compensation, more than Jane Street, OpenAI and Two Sigma. 

Tower Research Capital 

Who? Founded in 1998 by former Credit Suisse prop trader Mark Gorton, Tower Research Capital is a HFT firm comprised of engineers, physicists and computer science graduates. In addition to prop trading, the firm is a liquidity provider in equities and FX. Tower Research was where Hudson River Trading’s founders got their start, like Jane Street with SIG.

It had around 300 staff in 2017 and has since more than tripled headcount, driven by aggressive hiring in India with a focus on its IIT universities. 

Hiring? Tower has 68 roles split across 14 offices (and one data centre in the Hudson River Palisades). The office with the most openings is its New York base, followed by Gurgaon, India.

Tower isn’t just hiring for its trading teams. The firm has a venture capital arm/startup incubator that’s currently hiring a founding engineer and a staff engineer. Tower has increasingly ramped up its usage of ‘software vendor agreements’, in which it allows traders to keep control of their proprietary trades while using Tower’s infrastructure. It’s a similar setup to hedge funds like Millennium that will fund the launch of an external hedge fund for a top trader in order to retain their talents.

Pay? On the H1B Visa salary database, the average salary for Tower Research employees in 2025 was $164k, but a few employees earned over $200k. For total compensation, its UK entity paid its 112 employees an average of $376k in 2024

Citadel Securities 

Who? The sister firm of Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel, ‘CitSec’ is a market maker primarily operating in equities. It says it is the largest equities liquidity provider globally, and the largest market maker of all US equity options. It also operates in fixed income and FX, and is planning to become a liquidity provider in crypto. 

The firm is led by math-prodigy Peng Zhao, and has a few unusual quirks. For example, the firm has a mythical ‘goal book’ in which the firm’s employees suggest 5,000 goals for the firm to complete each year, which Zhao will peruse and annotate.

Citadel Securities has a few notable differences to Jane Street. While Jane Street’s pay is supposedly communist, Citadel Securities’ pay aligns more closely with personal performance. While Jane Street doesn’t give traders much visibility into their PnL, Citadel Securities gives staff more visibility. It does, however, give non-competes to some of its staff, which Jane Street isn’t thought to do.

Hiring: Citadel Securities had ~1,800 employees around the end of last year. According to its website, it currently has over 300 people in its relatively new Miami headquarters, and over 900 staff in New York. It has 40 full-time openings and 18 internships. 

Citadel Securities has one of the largest graduate schemes in the space. It has a school agnostic recruiting approach, but on average has similar favourite schools to Jane Street with a few separate favourites; multiple staff come from Peking University, Peng Zhao’s alma mater.

Recent senior hires include Herb Sutter, a C++ expert from Microsoft who has helped introduce the latest edition of the language to the firm. This month, it hired Hong Kong-based Morgan Stanley MD Richard Smerin as its global head of structured products; Citadel Securities also acquired the bank’s electronic market making team last July.

Pay: Citadel Securities paid its staff an average of $1m in the first half of 2025, thus was on track to pay $2m per head for the full year. For its European entity, 2024 accounts show that the firm paid an average of $1.1m per person, although that includes deferred compensation from the year previous.

Other major trading firms

XTX Markets: A London-based electronic trading firm with one of the largest GPU fleets in finance that paid £19.9m per head to its partners in 2024. Headcount there is quite lean, and it only has 10 openings. Founder Alex Gerko is the UK's largest taxpayer (and blocks us on LinkedIn)

Virtu Financial: The largest publicly traded electronic trading firm has had its headcount hovering just under 1,000 for the last few years. 

DRW: An electronic trading firm acting almost like a family office for its eponymous founder, Don Wilson. It has 2,000 staff, including over 800 technologists. In 2024, it paid £321.8k on average to its 322 UK staff. 

IMC Trading: An Amsterdam-based market maker with a strong Chicago presence. It reportedly offered $425k in return offers to its US interns last year, including $250k salaries.

Five Rings: A spinout of Jane Street led by the Ferrari-driving Jason McCarthy. It pays $300k salaries to quant researchers and gave its UK staff average compensation of $1.1m in 2024 despite that entity losing money.

Quadrature: Another London firm with thousands of GPUs, albeit more secretive. Quadrature paid 173 employees an average of £2.8m in 2024. It has strong links to the UK’s Labour Party.

G-Research: Another secretive British trading firm, this time with links to the Conservative party. It has been expanding in the US and appears to have spun out a high-performance computing team into its own firm, Northmark Strategies.

Radix Trading: Chicago-based trading firm focused on trading based on statistitcal and machine learning strategies. We noted its expansion to London a year ago, but it has only just incorporated a UK entity.

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