Quant search · frontier engineering, secondary
The quiet market for quants, researchers, developers, partners, and PMs.
Capital-grade quant talent. Few searches. Each one run to the standard a fund applies to its own capital.
Start a searchThe best quants are employed, discreet, and cannot be seen looking.
They never answer a job post. Reaching them takes a search that begins with the work itself: what the role demands, and the qualities that decide who can do it well. We find the people who hold those qualities and approach them directly, in confidence. What reaches you is a short list, every name reasoned, every name worth your time.
Quant first, mapped by discipline.
■ Primary — Systematic finance
- 01 Quant Research
- 02 Quant Trading
- 03 Quant Development
- 04 Low-Latency Engineering
- 05 Risk & Portfolio Engineering
- 06 Portfolio Managers & Partners
Secondary — Frontier engineering
- 07 Machine Learning Research
- 08 Software Engineering
- 09 Data Engineering
- 10 Infrastructure & Platform
- 11 Performance & Systems Engineering
- 12 Applied Research
How a search runs.
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01
Intake
We begin with the mandate: what the role has to produce, the constraints that genuinely bind, and the qualities that separate the people who last. Confidential on both sides, from the first call.
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02
Calibration
Every candidate is assessed against that same standard, by the person who took your brief and runs the search start to finish. We read for judgment: how someone thinks when the problem is hard and the path unclear.
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03
Shortlist
A short, ranked list, each name arriving with the reasoning that placed it there, already tested. Every approach is made in confidence, so the people who cannot be seen looking never are.
Rare events. Rare talent.
Travis has been recruiting his whole career, and the numbers habit came first. An economics grad from the University of Oregon, he spent the last five years recruiting for the kind of Silicon Valley companies that compete hardest over engineers. At Airtable, through its hypergrowth, he was repeatedly the highest-yielding technical sourcer in the org, netting 75+ senior engineers to offer stage.
At Waymo he ran hiring for ML and AI engineering, and the quant thread he follows now started there: Waymo's quant evaluation teams measure the safety of a system where the events that matter most are vanishingly rare, too rare for a clean A/B test, so they lean on counterfactual methods and billions of simulated miles to decide whether a model is actually safer. Learning to recruit against that bar, where the whole game is rare-event inference and getting the evaluation right, turned out to be a short step from the people quant funds and frontier labs now fight over, and that calibration set runs every Autonomous Search search today.
Travis Long, founder
Field notes on the quant market.
The house of quants, and everywhere it went
D.E. Shaw hired scientists in 1988 and built the most valuable alumni network in finance.
02 Cohort · 2026.05.25The quants are leaving for the machine god
The smartest math kids went to trade. A growing share now leave for AI labs.
03 Data · 2026.05.11What the quant firms actually pay, 2026
What the quant firms actually pay in 2026, by role, seniority, and city.