Blog10 min readApplr Team

XTX Markets vs Jane Street (2026): Pay, Interviews, London

XTX Markets vs Jane Street: ~$19M vs $11.3M revenue per head, 30-50 vs 100-200 hires a year, an ML-heavy OA vs a trading loop, and London pay compared.

XTX Markets vs Jane Street (2026): Pay, Interviews, London

XTX Markets and Jane Street are the two quant firms that most shape London hiring, and they want very different people. Jane Street is the large, broad employer: $39.6 billion of 2025 trading revenue, around 3,350 staff, and trader, researcher and engineer tracks that together hire an estimated 100-200 people a year (Reuters; Revelio Labs; Quantt). XTX is a small machine learning shop: just over 250 people (its own job postings), an estimated 30-50 research and engineering hires a year, no discretionary trading desk, and the highest revenue per employee of any major trading firm, at about $19 million against Jane Street's $11.3 million (Young and Calculated, July 2026).

If your edge is quick market intuition, apply to Jane Street. If it is machine learning research or serious systems code, XTX is the better fit, and it is also the harder firm to get into.

The 30-second verdict

XTX MarketsJane Street
Founded / HQ2015, London (Wikipedia)2000, New York (Revelio Labs)
2025 results£3.93B combined net revenue, +43%; £1.71B net profit (Finance Magnates, Apr 2026)$39.6B net trading revenue (Reuters, May 2026)
Headcount250+ across eight offices (XTX job posting, Sep 2026)3,357 (Revelio Labs, Mar 2026)
Revenue per head, 2025~$19M (Young and Calculated)$11.3M (Young and Calculated)
How it tradesAutomated, ML price forecasts; no discretionary traders (XTX careers)Market making and proprietary trading with human traders
Graduate tracksQuant research, software/trading developmentQuant trader, quant researcher, software engineer
Hires per year (Quantt estimates)30-50 researchers and engineers100-200 across all roles
First gate90-120 min OA; ~5-10% pass (Quantt)60-90 min online assessment (Quantt)
London grad pay (Quantt estimates)£200K-£350K, researcher£270K-£500K trader; £250K-£400K SWE
UK staff127 at core entity, avg ~£457K (Finance Magnates)790 at UK partnership, avg $1.88M (eFinancialCareers, Sep 2026)
Last 90 days10 open roles on its job board on 19 Sep 2026; the only student role is a $35K-a-month AI Research internship in New York (XTX Greenhouse)UK 2025 accounts filed; considering a 450,000 sq ft London office (eFinancialCareers, 16 Sep 2026)

Quantt describes both pay ranges as estimates, and its own XTX firm page quotes $200K-$350K in dollars while its interview guide quotes the same figures in pounds. Treat the numbers as indicating which firm pays more, not as offer figures.

Interviews: an ML filter vs a trading loop

XTX cuts hardest at the online assessment. Quantt's May 2026 guide describes a 90-120 minute test. Engineers get two or three hard algorithmic problems. Researchers get a combined machine learning and probability paper, often with a small data-analysis task. Quantt puts the pass rate at around 5-10%. After that comes a 60-minute technical phone screen with a working researcher or engineer, then a London super day of five to six interviews of 45-60 minutes each, with a decision one to two weeks later. The whole process usually takes four to six weeks.

The questions test statistics, not market sense. Tradermath's July 2026 guide gives a representative researcher question: if X and Y are independent standard normals, what is the expected value of X given that X + Y = z? The answer is z/2, by symmetry, and the grading is on whether you see that quickly and can explain why. The same guide says XTX looks for depth rather than breadth and is not an options market maker in the style of IMC, Optiver or SIG, so option-pricing games are not the focus.

Jane Street spreads its cutting across the loop. Quantt's April 2026 guide lists a 60-90 minute online assessment, a 45-60 minute phone interview, a second phone or video round, and a final day of four to six sessions over four to six weeks. Trader candidates play a mock trading game, and the rounds reward thinking out loud, handling uncertainty and updating your view when the interviewer adds information. Quantt recommends eight to twelve weeks of preparation and says the London office hires across all three tracks.

In practice: XTX preparation looks like a graduate machine learning exam plus competitive programming. Jane Street preparation is probability and mental maths that you can explain out loud while someone trades against you.

Pay, and what the UK accounts show

Both firms file UK accounts, which gives better data than the usual salary estimates, as long as you remember that averages include founders and senior staff.

  • XTX: the core UK entity had 127 employees in 2025 and paid £58 million in wages and salaries, an average of about £457,000 (Finance Magnates, April 2026). The firm also paid £1.78 billion in dividends in 2025 to its Cayman Islands holding company, which is controlled by founder Alex Gerko (FX News Group).
  • Jane Street: the UK partnership spent $1.48 billion on salaries and benefits in 2025 across 790 employees, an average of $1.88 million each, almost double the year before (eFinancialCareers, 16 September 2026). Globally, Jane Street paid $9.38 billion in compensation in 2025 (Yahoo Finance, May 2026).

For graduates, Quantt's estimates put Jane Street London above XTX at the top of the range: up to £500K for a trader against up to £350K for an XTX researcher. Jane Street's first-year bonus comes with a guarantee that sets a floor, and after that pay depends fully on performance (Quantt, August 2026). XTX's intern pay is the clearest public number either firm has: its own posting for the AI Research internship at XTY Labs in New York states a base of $35,000 a month. Young and Calculated's September 2026 recruiting guide puts Jane Street's Summer 2027 roles at an annualised $300K.

What people weighing XTX said on Blind. These are single threads, not surveys:

  • In a June 2023 thread, a Meta SRE with three years of experience asked whether to take Citadel or XTX in London. Commenters largely said XTX, citing better culture and work-life balance, and called its pay on par with Citadel, HRT and Jane Street. They also warned that £350K was optimistic at that level and suggested £250-300K was more realistic.
  • In a January 2024 thread, a Meta IC4 engineer with a £350K XTX number asked whether it was real. Commenters said the figure would be split between base and a cash bonus, not guaranteed, and one estimated £200-250K was realistic for that level. Opinions on hours were split: one Google engineer called XTX intense, while a Meta engineer said its work-life balance was better than people assume and that they had seen many moves from Meta to XTX and none the other way.

Culture, compute, and the India dispute

XTX spends on compute, not headcount. In January 2025 it committed over €1 billion to a data-centre campus in Kajaani, Finland, with the first 22.5MW facility due in 2026 (A-Team Insight). Its current job postings describe a research cluster of more than 25,000 GPUs with 650 petabytes of usable storage, and models that moved from econometrics to trees to neural networks to modern deep learning over ten years. Its careers page describes a flat hierarchy and a research-driven, fast-feedback environment. XTX is about a thirteenth the size of Jane Street by headcount.

Jane Street is growing in London. The UK partnership added over 100 people in 2025, and the firm is considering a London office of around 450,000 square feet, nearly double its current space (eFinancialCareers, September 2026). You get a larger graduate class, a trading desk and more internal moves.

The two firms have clashed in public. After India's regulator SEBI accused Jane Street in July 2025 of manipulating the Bank Nifty index, Gerko wrote on LinkedIn that the case "appears to stink very badly", according to eFinancialCareers. He also said XTX had shut its own Indian options trading in early 2025 after its Sharpe ratio collapsed. Jane Street calls the trades standard index arbitrage. It deposited Rs 4,843.5 crore to lift the ban, and its appeal was adjourned in February 2026 without a ruling (BusinessToday). This will not change a graduate's day-to-day work, but it is worth knowing before you interview at either firm.

Which should you choose?

  • You have an ML or statistics PhD, or publications: start with XTX. Its AI Research internship asks for a PhD in progress with at least a year left, a publication record at leading ML venues, and deep knowledge of transformers, and it tests you with a take-home exercise where you build a model from a dataset.
  • You are an undergraduate strong in probability and quick in conversation: Jane Street. Its trader track has no XTX equivalent.
  • You are a strong systems or C++ engineer: apply to both. Quantt describes XTX's engineering assessment as harder, and Jane Street teaches OCaml to new hires, so you do not need it beforehand (techinterview, July 2026).
  • You want the larger graduate class and more room to switch teams: Jane Street, on headcount alone.
  • You need a UK visa: both sponsor through the Skilled Worker route, where GOV.UK sets £41,700 or the going rate, and £33,400 for new entrants under 26 or switching from a Student or Graduate visa. Every public graduate estimate for both firms is far above that. A New York seat at either firm means the H-1B lottery after OPT.
  • You are applying for Summer 2027: Jane Street has been open since 12 July and filled last cycle's slots by late October (Young and Calculated). Apply this month. XTX's board currently has no undergraduate internship open, so watch its Greenhouse page rather than waiting on a fixed date.

Prepare for both

Sources

§ 01FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is XTX Markets harder to get into than Jane Street?
By raw seat count, yes. Quantt's May 2026 guide estimates XTX hires roughly 30 to 50 researchers and engineers globally each year and reports an online-assessment pass rate of around 5 to 10%. Quantt's Jane Street guide estimates 100 to 200 hires a year across all roles. XTX is also narrower: it hires almost entirely for research and engineering, so a candidate without strong machine learning or coding has no track to apply to.
Which pays more for a London new grad, XTX or Jane Street?
The public estimates overlap, and none of them comes from the firms. Quantt's May 2026 XTX guide gives £200,000 to £350,000 as an illustrative London graduate researcher package. Quantt's August 2026 Jane Street page gives £270,000 to £500,000 for a London graduate quant trader and £250,000 to £400,000 for a software engineer. Jane Street's published UK accounts show an average of $1.88 million per employee in 2025 (eFinancialCareers, September 2026), and XTX's core UK entity averaged about £457,000 (Finance Magnates, April 2026), but averages include senior staff.
Does XTX Markets hire traders?
Not in the Jane Street sense. XTX's careers page describes automated trading driven by machine learning price forecasts rather than discretionary traders, and its teams are research, trading development, trading analysts and support functions. Tradermath's July 2026 guide stresses that XTX is not an options market maker like Optiver or SIG. If you want to make markets by hand in a trading game, Jane Street is the better fit.
Why did XTX's founder criticise Jane Street?
In July 2025, after India's regulator SEBI accused Jane Street of manipulating the Bank Nifty index, XTX founder Alex Gerko wrote on LinkedIn that the case 'appears to stink very badly', according to eFinancialCareers. He also said XTX had closed its own Indian options trading in early 2025 after its Sharpe ratio collapsed. Jane Street describes the trades as standard index arbitrage, and its appeal was adjourned in February 2026 without a ruling (BusinessToday).
Can international students get a visa for XTX or Jane Street in London?
Both firms' London roles go through the UK Skilled Worker route. GOV.UK sets the general threshold at £41,700 a year or the going rate, and £33,400 for new entrants under 26 or switching from a Student or Graduate visa, capped at four years in total. Every public graduate estimate for both firms is several times those floors, so salary is not the obstacle; getting the offer is.
When do XTX and Jane Street open 2027 internships?
Jane Street's Summer 2027 trader and software roles have been open since 12 July 2026 with no stated deadline, and last cycle's interview slots were gone by late October (Young and Calculated, September 2026). XTX's job board on 19 September 2026 listed one student role: an AI Research internship in New York for PhD students available from January 2027, paying a base of $35,000 a month. Apply to Jane Street in September and check XTX's board regularly.
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