Hedge fund Balyasny on quant and tech hiring spree

Balyasny Asset Management, the multi-strategy hedge fund based in Chicago, has been doing some significant quantitative and technology hiring in London. 

The fund, which recently ranked 23rd in Fortune's best small and medium finance workplaces list, has been busy recruiting both senior and junior staff from rivals.

Dan Azzopardi joined this month as a managing director and head of macro technology from Rokos Capital Management, where he spent nearly three and a half years as CTO after nearly 11 years in markets technology at Barclays. Azzopardi will presumably be managing Balyasny's macro tech stack. 

He's not Balyasny's only major London hire this month. The fund also added Umer Khan, the head of quantitative credit research from Citadel. Khan too spent around a decade at Barclays, where he was head of flow and structured credit strats before joining Citadel in 2019. 

Balyasny also made a series of other quant and technology hires earlier this year. Maxim Zaraisky joined from Squarepoint Capital as a quant portfolio manager in January; Gabriel Cristian Ditu joined as a senior software engineer from ExodusPoint; Simon Day joined as a senior data engineer from Citadel; and Callum Ryan joined as a data engineer from Concirrus, a digital transformation agency in the insurance sector.

Balyasny had 90 UK employees in 2019 (the last year for which official data is available), and paid them an average of  £641k ($840k) per head.  Fortune says the fund has 500 employees in total, nearly 50% of whom have worked there less than two years and 67% of whom are millennials.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact:sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated 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. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by Pietro Jeng on Unsplash