2027 summer intern pay at electronic trading firms: Where you can earn $10,000 per week
Interning at a major electronic trading firm has always paid well but, next year, it's paying better than ever. Multiple electronic trading firms have already begun hiring for their 2027 summer intern cohort and are touting much bigger salaries to convince top students to join. We've looked at open job listings for summer internships at the major electronic trading firms in which salaries are disclosed and broken down where the highest paying internships are found.
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The highest paid interns in electronic trading might be at Susquehanna. Undergraduate quant trading interns at the firm will earn a base weekly salary of $7.6k in 2027 while PhD and Master's quants will earn $8.6k per week. It previously offered a weekly pay of $6k to its PhD interns. Interns also receive sign-on bonuses, which are known to reach the tens of thousands of dollars across the electronic trading space.
The highest total compensation (salary plus bonuses) publicly disclosed is at Optiver. It raised pay for its PhD quant interns to a maximum of $100k for the whole internship, up from $90k last year. Susquehanna's PhDs would need to earn a $15k sign-on bonus to beat that, assuming their internships last ten weeks. Optiver is also hiring software and FPGA engineering interns, which are each expected to make a flat $80k during their internship. Undergraduate quants can make up to $88k.
Electronic market maker Citadel Securities appears to have standardized pay for interns working across quant research, software engineering, FPGA engineering and machine learning research. Each internship pays a minimum of $4.5k per week and a maximum of $5.8k. The programs last 11 weeks, so total base pay ranges from $49.5k to $63.8k before bonuses. Engineers weren't as well compensated in previous years; when we last checked, they earned between $4.3k and $4.8k alongside a signing bonus of up to $25k. Citadel Securities was already paying $5.8k to its 2026 PhD interns, with bonuses of up to $35k.
Jane Street was early to the party when it comes to raising intern pay. Interns earned $5.8k per week in this summer's cohort across most of its open New York internships, up from $4.8k in 2024. Base pay has not been raised a second time for next year's cohort.
Why all the sudden pay rises? The rise of AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI will have likely played a part. Those firms have been aggressively pursuing talent in the quant space over the past few years, often providing work that the interns find more meaningful. Citadel Securities founder Ken Griffin told students last November not to do "something boring" and encouraged them to "pursue the areas in which you have a passion." He, as well as the other leaders in electronic trading, seems to have learned in recent years that this advice can work both for and against you.
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