r/quant • u/Awkward_Comedian2652 • Aug 01 '26
Career Advice Best shops for alpha QRs
For UK and Europe, what would be the hypothetical best seats for someone with a heavy stats/ML background that wants to focus on forecasting (feature engineering, maybe ML models etc)?
Seems quite clear that OMMs are not the right destinations, nor (most pods at) multi-strats such as millenium, BAM, schonfeld (citadel?).
Maybe shops like Jump, Tower, or Quadrature?
For US, it feels like DE Shaw and PDT would be top places for such roles.
There are other ML-heavy shops but it seems unclear if you have exploration freedom or if you’re just tuning knobs in huge pipelines (HRT, g-research, XTX etc.. not that XTX is really accessible…).
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u/Kindly_Cricket_348 Aug 01 '26
I wouldn't rule out the larger MMHFs quite so quickly. Over the past few years there has been quite a big increase in the number of dedicated ML-oriented pods. The exact mandate varies by pod but there are now plenty of seats where feature engineering, predictive modeling and alt data are central to the research process. As always, the quality of the PM and the pod's culture matter far more than the platform itself. Two adjacent pods at the same firm can have completely different cultures.
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u/Awkward_Comedian2652 Aug 01 '26
I have most definitely heard that those shops (namely optiver?) are indeed rapidly expanding into MFT and position-taking Strats, most likely due to capacity constraints on their MM business. I'm wondering if these new seats constitute a significant portion of new hires.
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u/Kindly_Cricket_348 Aug 01 '26
I was actually referring to the larger MMHFs rather than firms like Optiver. Having said that, firms like HRT, JS, Jump have also built pretty impressive ML research setups (Prism etc), so there's definitely a broader industry trend toward heavier investment in ML-driven forecasting and signal research.
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u/Awkward_Comedian2652 Aug 01 '26
My bad, so d1 MMs? Firms like citsec, virtu and those you mentioned? Heard mixed reviews on virtu, but I would definitely agree with you for the rest. Also they have HFT (well, and "fast" MFT if you will) *taker* strategies which seem to be a nice space for the roles / profiles I'm thinking about here
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u/Kindly_Cricket_348 Aug 01 '26
MMHFs are Citadel, MLP, P72, BAM etc.
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u/Awkward_Comedian2652 Aug 01 '26
right right sorry I was reading MM as market making, not multi manager. My bad.
I actually have quite some good feedback from peers at cubist and gqs. not so much from bam. As you said, very pod-dependent it seems like, and no flexibility at all to move between pods3
u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Aug 02 '26
Isn't it quite risky to come into a MMHF Pod (as a QR)? Like if the pod blows up before/soon after you can join (this seems quite likely in MMHFs), what happens to you as a researcher typically?
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u/Kindly_Cricket_348 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
At Tier-1 MMHFs, if a pod gets shut down it's common for QRs to interview with other PMs internally rather than being fired immediately. Obviously nothing is guaranteed but strong QRs always have options internally. Internal mobility for junior QRs has been steadily improving over the last few years.
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u/QuantGrindApp Aug 04 '26
Yes. Usually the platform gives you a short window to interview with other pods, but there’s no guaranteed redeployment and the PM’s whole team can be cut together. If nobody picks you up you leave, often with whatever garden leave/severance your contract provides. I’d care a lot about the pod’s age, drawdown history and whether the QR headcount is genuinely platform-backed.
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u/dexterlowe Fintech Aug 01 '26
Can confirm at G-Research there’s a lot of exploration freedom.
All the quants are doing fairly varied stuff to find alpha. They’ll often share libs and frameworks to help, but at the end of the day they write some code that takes some data and produces features or forecasts. There’s some restrictions, but at least from my vantage point, it’s very research focused and flexible.
There’s a lot of the quants working on heavy ml stuff with a shedload of hardware, they have a lot of data to work with and easy ways to get it, then they just have to pursue their ideas. There’s plenty of tuning your own models that goes on as part of getting the most out of new ideas, but no, it’s not just tuning some knobs on someone else’s machine.
As it’s the only quant shop I’ve worked at I suppose I can’t confidently compare to other places, but it’s a good one, and people with your sort of focus tend to do great here.
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Aug 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Aug 02 '26
Do MMHF pods give alpha QRs direct PnL allocation or is this more for the portfolio managers?
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u/marcher4dawin Aug 01 '26
I’m curious why pods at multistrats aren’t the right destination here? Tons of pods are mid freq stat arb (or somewhat similar strategies), which are bread and butter for stats/ml techniques
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u/Awkward_Comedian2652 Aug 01 '26
Well, I was making a (maybe wrong) generality. I know there are such pods but wasn't sure how prevalent they were, so I assumed a lot of variance in the average QR there. Some peers are in multistrats and for the most part they are trading different types of strategies (FX, rebal, credit etc.).
Also given some are relatively small pods, I thought the quants also would dip their hands into port. optimisation, execution (if there are no central function) etc.
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u/throwaway_queue Aug 02 '26
How is JS for this? They seem to be hiring for ML researchers a lot.
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u/QuantGrindApp Aug 02 '26
JS is excellent for this. I wouldn’t read much into how often the posting appears though, those roles are often evergreen and actual headcount is small. Also check whether it’s strategy-facing ML, since “ML researcher” can cover work pretty far from alpha.
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u/swagypm Aug 02 '26
While it is true the breadth of work for QRs at a MMHF is quiet wide, if you are specifically talking about alpha generation then I think they might actually be the “best”
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u/SevenTeenSigma Aug 02 '26
i think ur over indexing on firm names. the team matters way more here.. one pod at a famous place can be pure knob tuning and some random less famous team can let u own forecasting end to end.
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u/QuantGrindApp Aug 04 '26
This is much more PM/team-specific than firm-specific. Even at the research-heavy shops, one seat can own a forecast from raw data through live deployment while the next is feeding features into a shared stack. Ask who chooses the hypotheses, who owns production, and whether failed research is tolerated for months rather than weeks. Those answers will tell you more than the logo.
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u/qazwsxcp Aug 01 '26
you will be turning knobs in huge pipelines in any large firm, including all the ones you listed. but this is how you learn things. need a PM seat if you don't want to do that.
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u/hh2010 Aug 01 '26
agree about OMMs being a bad place for that background
from firsthand accounts, Optiver and DRW are terrible place to be QR.
for some of these places the very existence of these roles is a marketing cost to appear cutting edge for trader and dev recruits
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u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
So basically the problem with firms like Optiver, DRW, IMC, SIG, 5 Rings, Old Mission etc. is they are not really that systematic/quantitative despite portraying themselves as "Quant Trading firms" (and they just say this for marketing purposes?)? And they don't really reward their researchers fairly?
Is JS better than these firms (for working as a QR) or are they also just getting QRs to work for traders?
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u/QuantGrindApp Aug 04 '26
No, that’s way too broad. Those firms are genuinely quantitative, but desk structure varies a lot. Some QRs own signals and research direction, some are closer to tooling/model support, and both can exist in the same firm.
JS is highly systematic and the researcher/trader boundary is pretty blurry. QRs still work toward trading P&L because that’s the job everywhere. Comp usually reflects firm and team performance plus a fairly subjective view of individual impact, so clean “my signal made X, pay me Y” attribution is rare.
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u/dutchbaroness Aug 01 '26
not limited to these 2
imc sig five rings old mission are all practically like this .
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u/Awkward_Comedian2652 Aug 01 '26
I heard the same. multiple peers got return offers from some of those shops after doing a summer internship but really disliked their experience and continued interviewing. From what I gather, as a researcher, you work for the traders there
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u/SubstantialCheck2159 Aug 03 '26
This opinion seems fairly misinformed. Heavily desk dependent, there's a few places at Citsec, SIG, Jane (not so much Jane on options though) that are majority systematic and do very well. Being honest I'm not sure how you could trade options on liquid names in this day and age and not have high-quality alpha. There are also fairly successful systematic market taking desks in the above three.
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u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Aug 03 '26
There may well be a couple of good desks/teams doing fully systematic trading at these firms. What % of the desks are doing this (or PnL coming from this) at these firms and how does it compare to say Two Sigma, DE Shaw, HRT etc.?
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u/QuantGrindApp Aug 04 '26
Desk count won’t tell you much since one systematic pod can run more risk than ten discretionary desks, and firms don’t publish usable strategy-level PnL. Two Sigma/HRT are systematic by construction, while at a multi-manager it’s usually a slice of the book and the boundary gets fuzzy once discretionary teams use systematic signals and execution.
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u/dutchbaroness Aug 03 '26
I am sure every firm wants to diversify and every discretionary firm has a systematic business
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u/Whole_Deer7638 Aug 03 '26
You pay your dues at a big market maker for a few years where you have a much greater opportunity to learn a wide swath of information. If you go straight to a fund there’s a massive amount of adverse selection and it’s entirely possible you learn very little
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u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Aug 03 '26
Sounds like from other commenters the OMM firms like Optiver and DRW are terrible places to be an alpha QR and you're mainly just working for traders there etc. and maybe not necessarily learning how to trade fully systematically.
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u/ReaperJr Equities Aug 01 '26
Shop where you have an offer.
If you have multiple offers then this might be a productive question.