Two Sigma pay: quant vs engineering salaries at the hedge fund
Two Sigma might have been the chillest place for graduates, but it's not quite so calm at an executive level. The Wall Street Journal reports that the two co-founders, John Overdeck and David Siegel, have had a long-standing rift erupt into the public eye through the disclosure of the pair's inability to make decisions together in a recent SEC filing.
Overdeck, a mathematician, runs the hedge fund's researchers and modelers while Siegel, a computer scientist, runs its engineers. If you're a prospective employee looking to earn a massive buy-side salary, which founder should you ally yourself with? The table below shows average salaries for both quant researchers and engineers, filed on the H1B visa salary database since the start of 2022, to inform that choice.
The short answer here is, Two Sigma's quants earn higher salaries than its engineers, but there's more to it than that. For starters, the highest salaries of all actually belong to engineers. Just three quant researchers earn above $220k or more, while 17 engineers earn more than that figure.
And though engineers dominate the highest pay tiers, they also dominate the lower tiers too. While only four quant researchers earn below $200k, 21 software engineers earn lower, too.
Quantitative software engineers are a harder team to place, operating at the intersection of the two founders' jurisdictions. There are fewer quant software engineers on H1B visas at Two Sigma, but they're on big salaries.
Of course, salaries are just one part of the equation. According to Levels.fyi, the average cash bonus for Two Sigma software engineers in 2023 is $130k and average stock pay was just $7.8k. Those numbers will likely be higher for quantitative researchers who have a more tangible impact on the PnL of the fund.
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