The elite desert quants with the $1m+ salaries, and no bonuses

If you're a quant on the buy-side and you want to maximise your salary, you might want to get out of London and New York. Some of the highest salaries in the industry are on offer elsewhere: at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

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We've written about ADIA before. For the past five years, the sovereign wealth fund, which has over $1 trillion of assets under management, has been building a team of elite quants and technologists to work on 'scientific' investment principles, including AI. In 2022, the Financial Times reported that ADIA had 50 people in this Quantitative Research & Development team (QRD). Now we understand that it's closer to 150.

Known internally as "Team Q," the QRD's most public face is Marcos Lopez de Prado, a former partner at AQR and head of quantitative research at Tudor. De Prado joined ADIA in 2022, and publishes regular scientific papers, including most recently on the Sharpe ratio and private equity valuations. 

However, ADIA insiders say the real power in Team Q is not wielded by de Prado but by Majed Alromaithi, an Emirati who has no need of a LinkedIn profile. Alromaithi, who has a bachelor of Science in Financial Management from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a background in both HR and real estate investing, runs ADIA's strategy and planning department, which oversees Team Q. "Majed is the person who matters," says one insider. "This is his project."

ADIA declined to comment for this article. Speaking off the record, sources who've worked for the fund, said Team Q pays extremely well, but that compensation there is skewed entirely towards salaries. Team Q's technologists are thought to be on salaries of $500k+. Team Q's top quants are said to be on double or quintuple that, or more. Sources say there are no bonuses in Team Q: "It's just a very generous base." It's also a very generous base in Abu Dhabi, where income tax is zero.

This might be why few people leave Team Q, and why when they do, they tend to go into academia or to other sovereign wealth funds where the environment is more cerebral and less performance-oriented than at multistrategy hedge funds. Romain Lafarguette, for example, now runs a team at the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation; Charles-Albert Lehalle, a former global head of quantitative research and development at ADIA, is now a professor of applied mathematics at École Polytechnique in Paris.

Team Q isn't for everyone. Some of those who've left in the past say the environment there is more academic than applied, although this appears to have changed as the team has become more involved in high level portfolio allocation and work with ADIA's investment teams. 

The team is still hiring. Around 30 people are thought to have arrived in the past year and data scientists and engineers, machine learning researchers and engineers, and systematic portfolio managers are still being vacuumed up. 

Team Q isn't the only team in town at ADIA, though. There are other options, including the Core Portfolio Department, run by Michael Steliaros, the former head of quantitative execution services at Goldman Sachs. Steliaros' team manages ADIA's passive equity and fixed income exposures, optimizes rebalancing decisions and meets the liquidity and funding requirements of the total portfolio. Unlike Team Q, Steliaros' people are understood to get bonuses alongside their fixed pay.

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