Fintech
What it’s like to work at Robinhood and who they hire, from CEO Vlad Tenev
Robinhood is one of the most recognizable names in fintech, but how do you find work there and what is it really like? Robinhood founder and CEO Vlad Tenev recently appeared on a podcasts with venture capitalist Logan Bartlett where he discussed how the company approaches hiring and how much autonomy Robinhood employees have.
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How to get a job at Robinhood
Robinhood likes to hire two types of people. Tenev said these are “people who are at the beginning of their careers” with “higher potential” and “people with high mathematical talent.”
Tenev said Robinhood products require “a lot of engineering work” to perfect, but Coding experience is not (always) essential. “In some cases, even if you don’t know how to code Pythonwe will give you a chance,” provided you have demonstrated your competence elsewhere.
Robinhood also has something for Artificial intelligence talent. Tenev said fintech has been hiring AI employees “since it was called machine learning” and that “Robinhood will be the leader in AI in financial services.” What is he using all the AI for? “Taking a lot of the transactional relationship material and completely automating it.”
Tenev said Robinhood has high standards for hiring. He also said there have been some problems with people hired in the past. A few years ago, “a lot of people came to Robinhood because they thought it would look good on their resume.” In 2022, when Robinhood’s situation was more difficult, “a lot of those people were unhappy.” Tenev says that time was “heartbreaking,” but that people who aren’t hired in fair weather can be better. “Some of the people who joined back then were really incredibly good.”
What are the best jobs at Robinhood?
Tenev also provided some insights into Revolut’s general manager (GM) roles. These are leadership roles specific to product areas, but Tenev says they are much more than just product managers (PM). GMs “decentralize accountability and responsibility,” focusing more on profit and loss than traditional PMs. Tenev says general managers “live and breathe the product” and “feel a ton of pressure” to see it succeed.
There doesn’t appear to be a specific profile for Robinhood GMs. Crypto GM Johann Kerbrat had an engineering background with Uber and AirBnB. Futures managing director JB Mackenzie previously worked in electronic trading for MF Global and was most recently a managing director at Toronto Dominion. Rich Sommers, meanwhile, has spent much of his career as a lab technician.
Robinhood also has core product and marketing teams, and Tenev says there can often be “conflicts and tensions between the platform teams and the GMs.” One problem is that GMs “want to move fast and be independent,” without always ensuring consistency with the Robinhood product suite. Tenev says the benefit of this is that these topics are “conscious conflicts that overall improve the company” when resolved.
Why did Robinhood stop being remote?
Robinhood is also different from most fintechs because it has firm beliefs anti-remote work. Bartlett said on the podcast that he asked a Robinhood employee if he was in the office every day and they, without irony, responded, “no, only from Monday to Friday.” Robinhood once advertised itself as a remote company, but Tenev said he knew he “made a terrible mistake” the moment he announced it.
There are still a small number of remote jobs available at Robinhood, and Tenev says he hasn’t asked remote workers miles away from Robinhood offices enter if they already worked there. Tenev said that “most people actually clustered in the areas where we had offices anyway.”
Tenev said the reason for moving away from remote work is that “having some awareness of what people are doing is important” and interactions that facilitate this are “very difficult to produce in the remote world.” Even if you’re the only person on your team working from your office, Tenev says you should treat things as if “everyone in the company is ‘on your team’.”
What do employees think about working at Revolut?
Like enterprising fintechs like Revolution AND OakNorth, Robinhood is not free from internal criticism. Reviews on the Blind in 2024 workplace forum say managers “will not be ashamed to interrupt work in team chats at 00:00 on a weekend and expect you to respond” and many describe the environment as “chaotic”. One review states that most of these employees are simply “low powered” and only average “~25 hours of actual work per week.” Tenev himself said that people at Revolut need to be “really, really smart and high-powered.”
More positive reviews speak to the quality of the technical staff and say that the technology stack is “pleasant to work with.” They also praise how “open and transparent” the leadership team is. A frequent compliment to Robinhood is its compensation; is in fourth place on our list of fintechs that pay more, and engineers earn an average total compensation of $347.5k, according to Levels.fyi.
Despite the criticism, Robinhood staff appears to be getting results. Robinhood employees generate a obscene amount of revenue per employee, peaking at $871,000 last year. Think you have what it takes to be one of them?
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