AI is expected to fuel Wall Street's tech hiring in 2025. Headhunters break down what you need to know to get a leg up.
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- Recruiters say Wall Street firms are planning to hire more tech talent next year.
- Jobs at AI companies like Nvidia and OpenAI, or ones that work with their products, are highly sought after.
- Recruiters Ben Hodzic and Matt Stabile outline how jobseekers can stand out in the hiring process.
It's been a tough year for software engineers on the job market, but one bright spot is starting to emerge on Wall Street for technologists looking for a new gig.
Banks, hedge funds, and investment firms bullish on AI are expected to hire more tech talent in the new year, according to two headhunters who recruit engineers and data scientists for finance firms. That's good news for jobseekers in these sectors, which were long considered to be recession-proof careers but were hit this year with waves of layoffs, job freezes, and hiring cutbacks.
Ben Hodzic, a managing director at recruitment firm Selby Jennings who finds talent for hedge funds and investment banks, told Business Insider there's "a lot of optimism" around AI in financial services.
"Financial services institutions are slowly adopting their workflows and they've come to a reality where you need the right talent to actually build and implement and manage those products," he said.
In some cases, the hiring spree is already happening. Jamie Dimon, the boss of America's biggest bank JPMorgan Chase, said earlier this year that he's anticipating adding thousands of jobs related to AI in the next few years. Hedge fund and proprietary-trading firms are shelling out as much as $350,000 in annual salaries for top-tier AI researchers and engineers. Meanwhile, private-equity firms have been "clamoring" to hire AI operating executives to improve their portfolio companies.
Hodzic said the rosier outlook stems from a desire to build AI tools in-house and boost worker productivity in areas like wealth advisory, investment banking, and trading. More clarity on the direction of macroeconomic factors, like inflation and the impacts of the US election, is also providing tailwinds for banks looking to invest in human capital in 2025, he said.
While AI is expected to drive an uptick in tech hiring, the technology is also changing what it takes to get a tech job on Wall Street. BI spoke with recruiters to find out how candidates should adapt and what they need to do to stand out.
They outlined some of the industry's most in-demand skills, explained why having Big Tech experience might not get you that far anymore, and shared the companies that hiring managers want to see on resumes. They declined to disclose specific client activity due to privacy agreements.
Here's what software engineers need to know to get hired on Wall Street
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A few years ago, Matt Stabile, a tech recruiter who works with buy-side firms including Two Sigma and Susquehanna International Group, could almost guarantee an interview with a hiring manager if a candidate was coming out of a FAANG company.
"Now, due to overhiring and layoffs, those resumes seem to be a dime a dozen," Stabile told BI.
It's true that Big Tech companies have shed thousands of workers this year, flooding the job market with resumes touting the same companies, like Meta and Amazon. And only certain divisions of Big Tech companies on a resume will catch hiring managers' eyes, like Google's DeepMind, for instance, Stabile said.
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Finance firms witnessing the AI transformation from the sidelines want to get in on the action and build their own homegrown solutions. That's created demand among hedge-fund clients to ask for technologists specifically from Nvidia, Hodzic told BI.
"There's definitely an inherent need for people to understand the infrastructure side as well, how to actually construct the computer in the right way to be able to process some of this information and what quality of chips are needed in order to actually produce the output they're looking for," Hodzic said.
Stabile is seeing the same, with hiring managers getting excited to see talent coming from the $3.6 trillion chipmaker, AI startup Anthropic, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. He said these are the resumes that are getting through and being considered over all the others.
Even if you haven't worked at any of these companies, Stabile said experience and exposure to their software tools is still a highly sought after skill. He specifically highlighted the Nvidia Triton Inference Server, an open-source software that's key to deploying and executing AI workloads, Nvidia TensorRT-LLM, used to optimize the performance of large language models, and Nvidia Fleet Command, which is important for scaling AI deployments.
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If you haven't worked at a large AI company, or haven't worked with their latest products, not all hope is lost.
Wall Street banks especially rely heavily on legacy technologies. Some are built on codebases that have likely been around longer than the developer working on it has been alive. To be clear, that hasn't stopped financial firms from building entire businesses and offerings on modern technology.
What that has introduced, however, is the need to ensure that systems old and new can work together and exist in the same environment without introducing bugs or dependency issues. And in the case of firms moving on-premise systems to the public cloud, sometimes entire back-end systems have to be rebuilt.
As a result, hiring managers often light up when candidates can talk about their experience with software migrations, Selby Jennings' Hodzic said. If you've shifted data or software from one system to another, or translated code from one language to another, be sure to bring it up during the interview process.
"People who can demonstrate that engineering skillset of recreating and reconstructing things are really sought after," Hodzic said. "I think what a lot of clients want are people who can come in and show them what's not working well, how to iterate and how to improve, and then actually do it."
