{"id":271468,"date":"2025-07-18T07:36:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T07:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/271468\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T07:36:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T07:36:18","slug":"7-things-hft-quants-need-to-know-about-openai-before-accepting-a-3m-job-offer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/271468\/","title":{"rendered":"7 things HFT quants need to know about OpenAI before accepting a $3m job offer"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI has long admired financial services quants<\/a> and financial services quants have long admired OpenAI. It helps that people leaving hedge funds <\/a>and electronic trading firms<\/a> can go and work there while serving the lengthy non-competes<\/a> typical of the finance industry.<\/p>\n

Now it seems that Open AI is stepping up its financial services hiring efforts. Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman tweeted<\/a> an open call to HFT developers <\/a>in <\/strong>april. Business Insider<\/a> reported this week that OpenAI is now offering $3m for quants with just a few years’ experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That might be tempting. But do you know what you’re getting yourself into?<\/p>\n

Get Morning Coffee\u00a0<\/a>\u2615\u00a0in your inbox. Sign up here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Calvin French-Owen, a recently departed MTC (member of technical staff) at OpenAI \u00a0posted an extensive review <\/a>of his experience at the firm earlier this week. In it, French-Owen – who was described as “one of the best”<\/a> by ChatGPT’s head of engineering, <\/strong>revealed seven things that might surprise you about the OpenAI culture:<\/p>\n

1. There is no ‘master plan.’<\/p>\n

Given the cult of personality surrounding Sam Altman and his quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI). you might think OpenAI is ruled by Altman’s strategy. Not at all, says French-Owen. OpenAI didn’t have a roadmap for the next quarter at the time he joined.<\/p>\n

Instead, French-Owen said that teams naturally form around which research ideas most interest them, and that “most research gets done by nerd-sniping a researcher into a particular problem.” Boring ideas, or problems that don’t demand immediate attention, are disregarded. As good ideas emerge, French-Owen said OpenAI is able to change direction “on a dime,” but when it commits to something, it “goes all in.”<\/p>\n

2. OpenAI is a Python house, but has fans of Rust<\/p>\n

Regarding OpenAI’s tech stack, French-Owen notes that the firm has a “giant monorepo” built mostly in Python<\/a>. However, it also has “a growing set of Rust services<\/a> and a handful of Golang services.” He said the abundance of Python creates a “strange-looking codebase because there are so many ways you can write Python.”<\/p>\n

Because of that amorphousness, you’re expected to code with “a lot more guardrails,” making sure that code works by default and is hard to misuse.<\/p>\n

3. You’ll work until 4am some nights<\/p>\n

Employees of OpenAI<\/a> and other AI firms have told us that you’ll end up working much more hours in AI research than you were in finance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

French-Owen confirms this. In a sprint preparing to launch OpenAI’s coding agent<\/a>, Codex, he said he was regularly working 15-16 hour days. The night before launching, he and four others “stayed up until 4am trying to deploy the main monolith.”<\/p>\n

OpenAI staff seem to enjoy that grind. One MTC we previously spoke to said that work-life balance doesn’t exist there, because “nobody wants a life outside of deep learning.” Regarding Codex, French-Owen said “I’m not sure I’ve ever worked on something so impactful in my life.”<\/p>\n

4. The team you join matters.<\/p>\n

Not all teams are working at that pace; French-Owen said they can “vary significantly in culture.” He said some teams move at a more consistent pace while others are “sprinting flat-out all the time.”<\/p>\n

He also notes that experiences differ greatly depending on whether you work in research, applied or go-to-market teams. The MTC we spoke to previously told us that there’s a lot of snobbery among long-serving members of research teams, who view themselves as superior to applied colleagues. Given the rate at which OpenAI is growing, its unlikely you’ll encounter too many of them, however.<\/p>\n

5. There will be internal competition<\/p>\n

Internal competition will be nothing new if you’re a quant from a pod-based<\/a> hedge fund, but quants from friendly firms like Hudson River Trading<\/a> might want to take heed. French-Owen said there’s a “strong bias to action” and that successful researchers build products “without asking permission.” He said that there were 3-4 other teams working on coding agent prototypes at the same time he was.<\/p>\n

This bias to action is reflected in OpenAI’s promotion structure. French-Owen said promotions are “primarily based upon their ability to have good ideas and then execute upon them.” Office politics and the ability to present in an all-hands are less important.<\/p>\n

6. You’ll see regular Slack messages from Sam Altman<\/p>\n

French-Owen said one of the more idiosyncratic aspects of OpenAI is that “everything runs on Slack,” so much so that he only received 10 emails during his entire tenure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You’ll see frequent messages from all the OpenAI executives, including Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who French-Owen said are “quite visible and heavily involved… there are no absentee leaders.”<\/p>\n

7. You’re swapping PnL for Pro-Subs and ‘GPU math’<\/p>\n

French-Owen said that at Open AI “everything is measured in terms of ‘pro subs'” [professional subscribers to ChatGPT] and that you can immediately see how a new product launch has impacted that figure.<\/p>\n

On the flipside, French-Owen said that “everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost,” and you have to carefully calculate the load capacity required to launch a new product. Lowering latency helps, so it’s no surprise that Open AI is pursuing quants working in high-frequency trading.<\/p>\n

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you\u2019d like to share?\u00a0Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 <\/strong>Click here to fill in our anonymous form<\/strong><\/a>, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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