Balyasny's data hires: a Citadel database head, a New Yorker on $300k salary

It's not just the electronic trading firms analysing terabytes of data daily to trade. Hedge funds are hiring data specialists too, and Balyasny appears to have made a few big hires.

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Eric Ferreira joined Balyasny as a database engineering manager, based in Chicago. He spent the last six years as head of databases at Citadel, where he said he managed 300+ production databases. Ferreira was one of the many people to join finance from AWS in the late 2010s; Ferreira was a principal engineer and a subject-matter expert for Redshift, Amazon's cloud data warehouse.

Ferreira leaves Citadel amid its great shift from Chicago to 'Wall Street South' in Miami. Other Chicago based Citadel alums have been spotted leaving for Balyasny recently; Javier Cardenas, a Kubernetes platform engineer, joined Balyasny in May. The pair may not have been receptive to offers to relocate and it helps that Balyasny is based in Chicago.

Over in New York, meanwhile, Balyasny has been hiring multiple data specialists for Longaeva, the equities fund led by ex-Point72 PM Peter Goodwin who joined Balyasny as part of a $200m hiring splurge. According to the H1B Visa salary database, a consumer data lead joined the fund in January on a salary of $225k. This appears to be Sandi Xu, an ex-Morgan Stanley quant researcher who was most recently at Anomaly Capital Management.

A filing in January also shows that, later this month, Longaeva will be bringing in a head of data on a salary of $300k. This is the second-largest salary of all time that Balyasny has submitted on the database.

Balyasny declined to comment.

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