SWE will probably make between 250-500k. Quants who can come up with profitable trading strategies can make a lot more. Managers of trading teams can make over 1MM and sometime a lot over 1MM depending on how profitable their teams perform.

SWE who have deep subject matter experience are super valuable to these firms. Folks who understand how to write low latency code, FPGA work and other stuff like that. But the real money is in figuring how "how and what" to trade. Once that's done, the SWEs can bang out the code.

I work at a competing firm and our SWE new grads make $420-470k (including signing bonus).

JS pays their new grads similarly, just a tiny bit lower.

I guess, I live in the wrong country and wrong profession if I want to make that much of money. This is an stupidly gigantic amount of money. I know that I will not make this much gross any year of my life, actually this is around 7-8 years of my gross annual salary.. I know US vs UE etc. Still this is crazy. Not sure how UE salary in the same field/category compares.

This isn't much US vs Europe, as industry sector. You can probably make comparable amounts of money in the same sectors in London, Amsterdam or Paris.

Fortunately for you money doesn't buy happiness and life has the same end point no matter how rich you are ::)

Hire me and ill be your slave

> SWE will probably make between 250-500k.

New grad SWE is 400K

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/jane-street/salaries/softwa...

And levels.fyi not very accurate because 2nd year bonus is much larger than 1st year bonus in offer letter.

Quants/traders can hit $1M with 5 YOE not too difficult. Portfolio managers (similar to EM in tech) definitely $1M, sometimes $10M.

That is quite good and comparable to IB(investment banker) salaries. Meaning a few years ago $200k by 22, and incrementing $100k a year with $1M by age 30, and $10M by age 40 or so. The starting salaries out of college are now about $350k. My question is I wonder if the upward salary trajectory is similar to that IB track, this is assuming the employee has a somewhat upward career trajectory; does Jane street cap out folks at a certain level?

From my experience, the best way to get a pay increase is to code software for things closer to the trading system. Write code that makes a trading app faster and increases PnL, you'll make more money via bonuses. If you're writing back office code doing data loading, trade reconciliation or other "housekeeping" stuff, you'll not see the same comp.

Because of this, getting a SWE role that is assigned to a trading team is highly desired.

This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others. Maybe for a similar set of skills, JS doesn't pay (much) more than Meta or Google?

> This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is.

900k is average including janitors and HR.

Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi

> Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others

And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.

Janitorial staff is almost certainly subcontracted.

I'd agree for any other company or even public body, but I'd bet that JS prefer to keep it all in-house. They are extremely secretive.

Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.

Highly doubt that

> Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.

The entire tech industry has fewer billionaires than quant finance.

If you are ambitious, tech SWE is a bad deal.

The tech billionaires are far richer than quant finance billionaires.

And I would bet that tech SWE has a far higher probability of launching you into $10M+ range than quant finance.

I don’t know that a few more single digit billionaires (if that is even true) puts quant finance ahead of tech SWE in terms of potential rewards for the “ambitious”.

Also, quality of life is far better for tech SWE.

Getting into quant finance is not very common. Getting into tech SWE - even FAANG - is much more common. There are way more people working as SWE in tech than as quants.

I've rarely met anyone who is a quant and doesn't have a PhD. That already narrows down the field quite a bit.

> And I would bet that tech SWE has a far higher probability of launching you into $10M+ range than quant finance

$1B net worth? Google has more SWEs than the entire quant finance industry globally. Yet Google could only produce what, 4 billionaires?

$10M TC at Google? That’s at most 500 VPs out of 150,000 employees. That’s 0.3%. Not good odds. More than 7 people (0.3% x 2500) at Jane Street are making $10M+…

Same logic applies to $1M TC. Tech has okay chances, but quant is simply multiples better. Only if you got lucky at Tesla or NVIDIA. Otherwise your L5-E5 comp maxes at 600-800k including RSU appreciation.

Then for junior/new grad, quant firms win again. 300-500k quant SWE offers vs 200-300k in tech.

Hell, even for summer internships, quant trading firms pay SWE interns $20-25k/month. Also on levels.fyi

FWIW I'm getting contacted regularly by recruiters working with JS in London. When enquired about salary, from their experience, people with my experience can get about £350k+. It's higher than an L6 SWE at Google/Meta in London, but not outrageously so.

"Average" is a meaningless number here considering the equity partners are getting ~100% of the profits. It is very different from the shareholder model of large tech companies, so a direct comparison is pointless.