Fast growing quant fund building new team in low-cost tech hub
The standout hedge fund for hiring in 2024 was Qube Research and Technologies. The London based quant fund with a strong Parisian presence seemed to more than double in size last year; it ended 2023 at 526 employees according to its most recent Companies House accounts, but seemed to end 2024 closer to 1200. Now, it's branching out into new regions.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
Jacek Nikitiuk joined Qube last month as the head of Poland, based in Wrocław. He spent the past 19 months as Poland's location head in the chief digital information officer group, and was the technical lead for counterparty credit risk stream. He previously spent over a decade at Credit Suisse, where he was head of global trading solutions technology for Poland; Qube was initially spun out of Credit Suisse in 2016 and alumni of the bank are quite frequently spotted joining the fund.
The fund first established a Polish entity last April, but at present, Nikitiuk appears to be the only Poland-based employee. In a job listing for an EMEA payroll manager in London, however, Poland is included as a pay jurisdiction alongside the UK, Denmark and the UAE. Qube already has offices in all these other locations. The fund's Polish entity is registered at Generation Park Z, an office building in Warsaw.
Qube may have its eye on additional offices in other countries; the payroll manager listing mentions "plans to take on additional jurisdictions in the future."
Poland appears to be a burgeoning location for hedge fund talent. Point72 was the first hedge fund to actively recruit there back in 2021. It was followed by Balyasny last year. Prior to that, the region was a long-time tech hub for banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. They may be interested because Poland is thought to have particularly good schools for C++ developers.
Both rival funds base their Polish teams in Warsaw, however. If Qube is building out in Wrocław, it taps an area mostly untouched by hedge funds. It is, however, a tech hub for (surprise, surprise) Credit Suisse and UBS.
India is another low-cost tech hub that hedge funds like; Millennium for example has been hiring there since 2022. Qube created an Indian entity in 2018 and employs ~60 people in its Mumbai office.
Somewhat strangely, Qube appears to have offices in every region except America. In addition to its multiple European offices, Qube has locations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai. It also just opened a new office in Sydney, complete with a glass-walled server room and a lego station. Qube does hire from the US, but tends to relocate them; Sam Hou swapped California for Hong Kong when he joined from Cubist Systematic Strategies last month.
Qube declined to comment.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
Photo by Marc Linnemann on Unsplash
