Quantitative Trader/Researcher Intern - Summer 2027

Poker AI turns to trading. Three former DeepMind researchers taught an AI to beat professional poker players. Now the same approach trades stocks. Their Prague lab, EquiLibre Technologies, reached a $500 million valuation after a Series A led by Creandum, and the early results look strong. Key takeaways. * EquiLibre Technologies, founded by three ex-DeepMind researchers, reached a $500 million valuation after a Series A led by Creandum, the firm's largest single investment ever. * Working with quant firm Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre's agents trade billions daily across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq and claim zero negative months since inception. * The founders came from the DeepStack poker project and apply reinforcement learning, where markets offer one simple reward signal: profit. Why poker and markets rhyme. Both games reward the same kind of learning. Reinforcement learning trains a model through rewards, letting it improve by trial and error. Poker and trading both suit that method well, and trading has one clean scorecard. "The nice thing about trading and markets is that the scoring is super simple: how much money did the agent make?" said Martin Schmid, EquiLibre's CEO. This is not play money. Partnered with Tower Research Capital, EquiLibre's algorithms trade billions in daily volume across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The startup says its agents have done well since launching on crypto in 2025 and now on stock exchanges, claiming "a perfect record of zero negative months since inception." Academic work on reinforcement learning for quantitative finance has pointed at this potential for years. A lab first, not a fund. The money came fast. Creandum led the round, and vice president Cameron Sellers confirmed it was the largest single investment the firm "has ever made in one go into a company." He framed the appeal in scale. "The potential total addressable market of trading in the financial markets is one of the biggest on earth, and there are countless funds over the years that have generated quantums of profit that make most venture-backed successes look small," Sellers said. He also noted that EquiLibre calls itself "a lab first, not a finance firm." The founders back that identity. Schmid, along with CTO Rudolf Kadlec and CSO Matej Moravcik, do not come from finance, and Schmid says that is not the draw. "I'm not doing this because I'm excited about making markets efficient. I'm doing this because we are all excited about building new things that have never been built before, and this is a lot of fun to build," he said. The trio met as visiting PhD students at DeepMind's Edmonton office, which Alphabet closed in 2023. There they built DeepStack, the first AI to beat pros at no-limit Texas hold'em. Their advisory board includes Rich Sutton, who won the 2024 Turing Award for his reinforcement learning work. Money, chips, and rivals. The funding history climbs steeply. A pre-seed came from Credo, an early backer of ElevenLabs and UiPath. A $10 million seed led by Blossom Capital valued the company at $140 million. The Series A now pegs it at $500 million. The team of 25 plans to scale its compute next, aiming to bring online one of the largest clusters in Central and Eastern Europe. Prague helps, Schmid says. "It's much easier to keep the good people here, because there's not a new sexy AI thing happening every two months." Competition is real. Trading giant Jane Street says it already uses reinforcement learning with large language models, "or whatever else we need to train good models," and claims "tens of thousands of high-end GPUs." EquiLibre wants to squeeze more out of far fewer chips and "get more from less," Schmid said. He is not treating it as a fight to the death. "This is not a winner-takes-all market." A trend investors keep chasing. DeepMind alumni have become a favorite bet. Money keeps flowing to elite researchers starting labs outside the big incumbents, from London to Prague, and nine-figure and ten-figure rounds for ex-DeepMind teams now land regularly. The founders describe trading as a field where the market delivers its verdict every millisecond, with a research team drawn from DeepMind, Google, and top trading houses. That framing, technology as the entire game, is exactly what pulls big checks toward the crowded AI startup market. Quant funds are moving the same direction. Machine learning is replacing older statistical methods across the industry, and reinforcement learning has gone from fringe to standard in a few short years. "When we started, people were skeptical," Schmid said, though the mood has flipped. "Because we started four years back, we believe we are ahead." Whether the head start holds is the open question, and the report that revealed the round makes clear that deep-pocketed rivals are training the same techniques on far more hardware.

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan tech MDs are leaving for hedge fund Millennium. 5 hours ago Katarina Hunt It's a tale as old as time for a banking technologist to be tempted over to a multistrategy hedge fund. Two MDs have recently trodden that beaten path and joined Millennium, despite working at different banks and in different continents. Keep Watching "I left a top US bank for a European rival and it was pitiful" Watch More Katarina Hunt joined Millennium in London as its head of risk engineering. She spent the last 13 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was most recently global head of engineering for equity derivatives and equity risk. We highlighted her as one of the fastest rising VPs at Goldman just over a decade ago; she made MD five years after that, and five years further on, she's now joining Millennium. In New York, meanwhile, Millennium hired James Clennell from JPMorgan as its head of credit technology. He spent over two decades at the bank, starting as an analyst in its middle office and working his way up to MD in 2024. He was most recently global head of credit trading and risk management technology; he left the bank late last year and spent the first half of 2026 working on a motorsports data platform. It's not all about hiring technologists from banks, or even hedge funds these days. Electronic trading firms like Jane Street are on the rise and funds are building out their low latency architecture to compete with them. In April, we noted that Millennium hired Alexandre Fournier, former CTO of Tower Research Capital, for a senior role in its algorithmic execution team. Millennium did not respond to a request for comment. Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently 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. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today.

Hedge funds and market makers need data strategists as war heats up. 6 hours ago How can you achieve a trading advantage in the fog of war? How about satellite imagery of damage to oil refineries, data on tanker movements, or movements of troops? Business Insider reported last week that hedge funds are turning to this kind of data amidst war in the Middle East. And there were already signs that data strategists and sourcing experts are on the move. In February 2025, Drew Lee, the VP of financial data at DE Shaw disappeared on gardening leave after 20 years with the fund. Last week, Lee announced that he's joined proprietary trading firm Tower Research as head of data strategy and and sourcing. Lee is not the only senior person moving in the space. Evan Reich, the former head of data strategy and sourcing at Verition recently moved to intelligence firm BWG Global. Tony Berkman, a Two Sigma managing director who specialises in large empirical data sets, has been on gardening leave for the past year and is due to resurface. Most funds already have large data sourcing teams and those that don't have been building them. Balyasny Asset Management for example spent 2025 adding to its data team under Jeremy Ridder Brunelli, the head of alt data and geospatial research who joined from UBS in 2022. For those who want to get in at the bottom, Verition is currently hiring data sourcing associates in New York. The roles reportedly involve sourcing the data, negotiating its price, onboarding, ensuring it's legitimate (governance) and analysing how portfolio managers use it. Alt data specialists work on data that delivers investible narratives in real time. Citadel has one of the largest teams within its data strategies group. Since November, this has been run by Jian Xu, a Citadel data scientise who launched the firm's "Alternative Data Observatory." Xu says this is now used by over 30% of Citadel's investment professionals. Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently 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. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today.