As we reported three years ago, hedge fund Point72 discovered a source of “talented, highly-educated” and it wasn’t in India.- Steve Cohen’s fund has been hiring software engineers in Warsaw since 2021. Now it seems Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) is doing the same.
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BAM declined to comment for this article, but Dmitry Balyasny’s fund is currently listing 12 jobs in Warsaw, including one for a senior recruiter to “spearhead the build out of the technology and data teams in the Warsaw office.”
It’s not clear how many people Balyasny intends to have in Warsaw. Point72 said in 2020 that it intended to have 150 people working across finance, technology and operations in Poland by the end of 2021. Over 300 people are currently listed as working there on LinkedIn, many of them software engineers.
Hedge funds are following in banks’ footsteps. Goldman Sachs, Citi and JPMorgan also have Warsaw teams. “There are 1.3m students in Poland and a good proportion are studying finance or technology. It’s a very deep and broad talent pool,” Goldman told us in 2017.
It probably helps that median total compensation for a software engineer in Warsaw is £51k ($65k) according to Levels.fyi, versus £94k in London, £106k in New York and £99k in Dallas (a popular near-shoring centre).
BAM has got itself a few software engineers in Warsaw already. Paweł Elert, a former executive director at Goldman Sachs in Poland, joined on a contract basis in September 2022. Michal Paczes, a Python engineer, joined in 2021.
Multistrategy hedge funds are under pressure to cut costs as higher interest rates have hiked the risk-free rate of return, making it harder to pass through costs to investors. Millennium began hiring engineers in India in 2022 and had 21 people there last year.
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