Quant Recruiting in 2025: Why the Best Minds Are Going to Hedge Funds, Not Big Tech

In 2025, a clear trend has emerged: senior data scientists and machine learning engineers are increasingly leaving—or bypassing—Big Tech in favor of hedge funds. While Silicon Valley once held a near-monopoly on attracting elite quantitative talent, that balance of power is shifting rapidly.

According to SignalFire’s 2025 State of Talent report, Big Tech has reduced headcount growth and increasingly favors generalists and internal AI tooling over experimental teams. The impact? A growing number of highly experienced professionals are seeking new, more intellectually demanding environments—often landing in multi-strategy hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and quantitative asset managers.

Hedge funds are leveraging this shift to aggressively scale their technology stacks. Leading firms such as Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 have hired dozens of former Google, Meta, and Amazon engineers over the past year, targeting those with deep reinforcement learning, high-performance computing, and NLP backgrounds.

In particular, demand has surged for experts who can build alpha-generating infrastructure around alternative data ingestion, custom LLM tooling, and real-time market microstructure modeling. A 2025 report by Empaxis found that senior quant engineers with 10+ years of experience are now commanding 30–50% compensation premiums at hedge funds compared to equivalent roles in Big Tech.

The value proposition is compelling: not only are base salaries higher, but total compensation, often tied to fund performance—can easily reach seven figures. Moreover, hedge funds offer smaller, faster-moving teams and direct influence over PnL, a key draw for seasoned professionals frustrated by Big Tech bureaucracy.

A Chinese quant fund now managing $15B, which has hired over 100 PhD-level engineers from tech and academia to build proprietary trading algorithms and decision-making systems powered by AI. "We’re not a financial firm that uses tech—we’re a tech firm that trades," says one of its senior directors.

Hedge funds have become not only a viable alternative to Big Tech, but the preferred destination for senior quants seeking intellectual rigor, outsized compensation, and a tangible connection between their work and financial results.