Fintech
Elon Musk is hiring quantum HFT experts and fintech engineers at AI, his new AI startup
He’s not alone OpenAI and anthropic attractive engineers away from the financial services sector. Elon Musk’s emerging competitor xAI and its GenAI chatbot Grok raised $6 billion last week at an $18 billion valuation, and have looked beyond just Deep mind during intake.
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Ivan Smirnov is one of its most recent hires. He has spent the last year and a half as a partner and quantitative researcher at a private trading company in Dublin, and had previously spent nine years at high frequency trading Susquehanna firm. Another recent recruit in February was Nathan Ziebart; he has spent the last six years at fintech unicorn Robin Hood, where he was promoted three times from senior engineer to principal. Previously, he was chief technology officer for infrastructure at Palantir Technologies.
xAI has 18 open job listings and getting in won’t be easy. The hiring process includes four technical interviews; three individual interviews and one team interview, which unusually requires you to “give a 20-minute presentation on the most challenging technical problems you’ve solved.” Moss took a serious amount of criticism for how he handled the layoffs in “The app formerly known as Twitter” when he first purchased it, using lines of code typed to identify which engineers to fire. xAI appears to take a more outcomes-based approach; maybe he’s learned his lesson, maybe (since all applications are reviewed by the tech team rather than recruiters or Musk), he hasn’t.
xAI also seems quite competitive in terms of compensation. Two product engineering roles, in artificial intelligence and data respectively, have a salary range of up to $500,000. In the H1B Visa salary database, only one confirmed salary is visible: a technical staff member earning a salary of $300,000. It is also alleged that Musk tempted tech experts with the promise of a nine-figure total compensation with 1% equity offerings in the company. In its most recent assessment, that claim appears to have been proven correct much faster than expected.
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