Competition for top quant talent has never been stiffer. With top hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms in expansion mode - and increasingly encroaching on the same turf - the mathematicians, physicists, data scientists, and engineers who power them are in high demand. The emergence of AI labs, which can outbid even the top-tier finance firms with war chests of tens of billions in capital, has only ratcheted up the competition.
In 2025, AI became officially unavoidable: It had been lurking in the background before, as early adapters experimented with it. But this year, companies invested more than $202 billion in AI, a 75% increase from $114 billion invested in 2024. Major tech companies fought bitterly over AI talent, offering astronomical pay packages. There was a groundswell of demand for talent, and unsurprisingly this spread to the demand for AI,