Key Takeaways
- XTX Markets is the world's largest spot FX market maker with roughly 250 employees and tens of billions in cumulative revenue, making it one of the most lucrative places per head in finance.
- The firm hires almost exclusively for mathematical and engineering excellence, with olympiad medals, top PhDs, and competitive programming success carrying real weight on a CV.
- Apply directly through xtxmarkets.com/careers; XTX rarely engages external recruiters for technical roles and treats every direct application seriously.
- Expect a hard online quantitative assessment as the first technical gate, followed by deep probability, statistics, and systems interviews calibrated to PhD-level rigor.
- Engineering candidates should prepare modern C++, lock-free concurrency, Linux performance, and kernel-bypass networking; researchers should prepare open-ended modeling discussions on noisy real-world data.
- Cultural fit matters: XTX explicitly avoids predatory high-frequency strategies and prefers candidates who treat trading as a scientific problem rather than a game to win at any cost.
- Compensation is at the very top of the industry, but the firm stays small on purpose — there is no large junior class or rotational program, so every hire is expected to contribute meaningfully from day one.
- Intellectual honesty is the single most important behavioral trait; admit what you don't know, reason from first principles, and avoid jargon or name-dropping during interviews.
- XTX is privately owned by founder Alex Gerko, has never taken outside capital, and reinvests heavily in research, GPU infrastructure, and philanthropy through the XTX Markets Foundation.
About XTX Markets
XTX Markets is a London-headquartered algorithmic trading firm widely recognized as the world's largest currency trader by spot FX volume, consistently ranked at the top of the Euromoney FX Survey for spot trading market share for several consecutive years. Founded in 2015 by mathematician and former GSA Capital partner Alex Gerko alongside a small team of researchers and engineers, the firm has grown into one of the most influential non-bank market makers on the planet, providing liquidity in foreign exchange, equities, fixed income, commodities, and cryptocurrencies across more than 35 trading venues globally. Despite its outsized impact on global markets, XTX remains deliberately small, employing roughly 250 people across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Mumbai, Yerevan, and Paris. The firm has reported trading revenues exceeding 30 billion dollars cumulatively since inception, with annual revenues that frequently outpace those of much larger investment banks on a per-employee basis, a ratio that the firm uses internally as a measure of how seriously it takes hiring discipline. XTX is privately owned, has never accepted external capital, and is renowned in the industry for the discipline of its risk management, the sophistication of its machine learning research, and its principled stance against high-frequency arbitrage tactics that exploit slower participants. The firm is purely a market maker and proprietary trader, executing only with its own capital and explicitly avoiding latency-sensitive predatory strategies, instead focusing on producing better mid-prices through deep statistical models that absorb risk and recycle it efficiently across asset classes. Culturally, XTX positions itself as a research-first organization in the mold of an academic department, hiring exceptional mathematicians, physicists, machine learning scientists, and engineers and giving them the tools, data, and compute to push the frontier of quantitative finance. The firm has been vocal in industry policy discussions, regularly publishing public letters on market structure, last-look practices in FX, and the responsibilities of major liquidity providers. Alex Gerko remains one of the most generous tech philanthropists in the United Kingdom, having donated hundreds of millions of pounds to mathematics education, charitable causes, and Ukraine relief efforts through the XTX Markets Foundation, including the funding of permanent endowments for mathematics olympiad training and university scholarships. The firm is also notable for building one of the largest privately owned GPU clusters in Europe, originally to support trading research and increasingly to support open AI research grants and external scientific computing through the XTX AI Compute initiative. For candidates, XTX represents one of the most prestigious destinations in quantitative finance, offering compensation that rivals the very top of the industry alongside genuinely interesting research problems, modern infrastructure, long employee tenure, and an unusually flat, intellectually serious culture that rewards depth over showmanship.
Application Process
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1
Apply directly through the XTX Markets careers website at xtxmarkets
Apply directly through the XTX Markets careers website at xtxmarkets.com/careers — XTX rarely uses external recruiters for technical roles and prefers direct applications.
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2
Submit a concise CV (one page preferred) that emphasizes mathematical achievemen
Submit a concise CV (one page preferred) that emphasizes mathematical achievements, olympiad medals, PhD research, and concrete engineering results rather than buzzwords or job descriptions.
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3
Complete an online quantitative assessment that typically tests probability, sta
Complete an online quantitative assessment that typically tests probability, statistics, mental arithmetic under time pressure, and brain teasers — this is a hard cutoff and many strong candidates are filtered here.
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4
Progress to a first-round technical interview by phone or video, focusing on pro
Progress to a first-round technical interview by phone or video, focusing on probability puzzles, statistical reasoning, and sometimes a coding screen for engineering candidates.
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5
Attend a multi-round on-site (or virtual on-site) at the London office, usually
Attend a multi-round on-site (or virtual on-site) at the London office, usually involving 4 to 6 interviews covering math, machine learning, systems design, low-level coding, and cultural fit.
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6
Engineering candidates should expect deep dives into C++, Linux internals, netwo
Engineering candidates should expect deep dives into C++, Linux internals, networking, and concurrency; researcher candidates should expect open-ended modeling discussions and live data analysis.
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7
Receive an offer decision within one to two weeks of the final round
Receive an offer decision within one to two weeks of the final round — XTX is known for fast, decisive hiring once they identify a candidate they want.
Resume Tips for XTX Markets
recommended
Keep your CV to a single page if possible — XTX reviewers value information dens
Keep your CV to a single page if possible — XTX reviewers value information density and dislike padded resumes; every line should earn its place.
recommended
Lead with quantitative credentials: International Mathematical Olympiad medals,
Lead with quantitative credentials: International Mathematical Olympiad medals, Putnam scores, Kaggle rankings, ICPC finals, top-of-class rankings at strong universities, and PhD publication venues all carry significant weight.
recommended
For research roles, list your most important papers with venues (NeurIPS, ICML,
For research roles, list your most important papers with venues (NeurIPS, ICML, JMLR, top physics journals) and briefly state your individual contribution rather than hiding behind a long author list.
recommended
For engineering roles, be specific about systems you built: throughput numbers,
For engineering roles, be specific about systems you built: throughput numbers, latency reductions, languages used, and the concrete problem solved — vague phrases like 'optimized performance' will be ignored.
recommended
Avoid corporate jargon, agile rituals, and management-speak; XTX hires individua
Avoid corporate jargon, agile rituals, and management-speak; XTX hires individual contributors and is skeptical of candidates who describe themselves primarily through team processes.
recommended
Show evidence of self-driven learning: open-source contributions, personal resea
Show evidence of self-driven learning: open-source contributions, personal research projects, competitive programming profiles, or independent trading and modeling work all signal the autonomy XTX expects.
recommended
Mention any work with low-level systems, kernel bypass networking, FPGA, GPU pro
Mention any work with low-level systems, kernel bypass networking, FPGA, GPU programming, or large-scale distributed training if you have it — these skills are directly relevant to XTX's stack.
recommended
Skip generic objective statements and skills lists; instead, write a one-line su
Skip generic objective statements and skills lists; instead, write a one-line summary at the top stating exactly what kind of role and team you are interested in at XTX.
ATS System: Direct Application (Custom Careers Portal)
XTX Markets operates its own custom careers portal at xtxmarkets.com/careers rather than using a major third-party ATS like Greenhouse, Workday, or Lever. Applications are submitted directly through the firm's website, where each open role has its own dedicated page with a structured application form and CV upload. Because XTX rarely uses external recruiters for technical positions and reviews every direct application internally, the portal is the single most reliable channel into the firm.
- Always apply directly through xtxmarkets.com/careers rather than via LinkedIn Easy Apply or third-party recruiter postings, which may not reach the internal pipeline.
- Upload your CV as a clean PDF with a sensible filename (LastName-FirstName-CV.pdf) and avoid fancy graphics or multi-column layouts that can confuse parsers.
- Use the optional cover letter or notes field to state explicitly which team or research area interests you and why XTX specifically — generic applications stand out negatively.
- Provide working links to GitHub, Kaggle, Codeforces, or your Google Scholar profile if relevant; XTX reviewers will look at them.
- Apply only to roles you are genuinely qualified for and interested in; XTX tracks repeat applications and prefers a single thoughtful application over a scattergun approach.
Complete Direct Application (Custom Careers Portal) Resume Guide →
Interview Culture
Interviews at XTX Markets are widely regarded as among the most demanding in the quantitative finance industry, but they are also fair, transparent, and intellectually genuine, which is why even unsuccessful candidates frequently describe the experience positively in public forums. The firm explicitly states that it is looking for the very small number of people in the world who can operate at the frontier of mathematical and engineering ability, and the interview process is calibrated accordingly. Candidates should expect long sessions of probability and statistics questions that go well beyond textbook material — interviewers will press on edge cases, ask you to derive results from first principles, and probe how you think when you are stuck rather than just whether you arrive at the final answer. Brain teasers and estimation problems remain a core part of the screen, but they are evaluated less on the final number and more on the structure of your reasoning, the assumptions you make explicit, and your willingness to revise your approach when given new information. Engineering interviews are similarly rigorous, with a strong emphasis on modern C++ (often C++20 features such as concepts, ranges, and coroutines), memory models, lock-free and wait-free programming, cache-aware data structures, and an understanding of what the hardware is actually doing beneath the abstractions. Expect questions about how a particular code path interacts with the CPU pipeline, what the operating system is doing during a system call, or how to design a low-allocation hot path for a market data feed. Research interviews lean toward open-ended modeling discussions where you may be handed a real-world dataset or problem and asked to reason about feature engineering, model selection, evaluation under non-stationarity, overfitting risk, and deployment in a live environment with real costs and constraints. The atmosphere is typically calm and collegial rather than adversarial; interviewers are practicing researchers and engineers who genuinely enjoy the problems they pose, and they are forthcoming with hints if you are making honest progress. The firm prizes intellectual humility highly — bluffing, name-dropping, or trying to game the conversation will end the process quickly, while admitting what you do not know and then reasoning carefully from what you do is consistently rewarded. There is also a clear cultural screen: XTX wants people who care about doing the right thing for markets, not just maximizing personal P&L, and interviewers will sometimes discuss the firm's public positions on market structure to see how you engage with them. Decisions are made by consensus among the interview panel and are usually communicated quickly, and successful candidates often describe the day as one of the most enjoyable interview experiences of their careers, even when the final outcome was a no.
What XTX Markets Looks For
- Exceptional raw mathematical ability, typically demonstrated through olympiad results, top university coursework, or a strong PhD in a quantitative field such as mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, or electrical engineering.
- Deep fluency in probability and statistics, including the ability to derive results from first principles rather than recite memorized formulas.
- For engineers, mastery of modern C++ and a genuine understanding of low-level systems: cache hierarchies, kernel bypass networking, lock-free data structures, and Linux performance tuning.
- For researchers, demonstrable experience building and validating predictive models on real, noisy data — Kaggle Grandmaster status, published ML research, or prior quant trading experience are all strong signals.
- Intellectual honesty and the ability to say 'I don't know' followed by a clear plan to find out — XTX is allergic to bluffing and credential-flashing.
- A research-first mindset: candidates who treat trading as a scientific problem, value reproducibility, and care about evaluation methodology over flashy results.
- Willingness to focus deeply on a single problem for long periods rather than chase variety; XTX teams are small and people are expected to own their work end to end.
- Cultural alignment with the firm's principled stance against predatory trading and its commitment to acting as a constructive market participant.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does XTX Markets actually do?
XTX is an algorithmic market maker and proprietary trading firm. It uses statistical and machine learning models to provide two-sided quotes in foreign exchange, equities, fixed income, commodities, and crypto across more than 35 venues, profiting from the spread between its bid and ask while managing inventory risk. It does not manage outside money and is not a hedge fund.
How many people work at XTX Markets?
XTX deliberately stays small, with approximately 250 employees across London, New York, Singapore, Mumbai, Yerevan, and Paris. Headcount has grown slowly and selectively despite the firm's enormous trading volumes, which is part of why per-employee revenue is among the highest in finance.
What kind of background do I need to get hired at XTX?
Most successful candidates have a top degree in a quantitative field (mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, or electrical engineering) from a strong university, often supplemented by a PhD, an olympiad medal, top competitive programming results, or significant industry experience at another elite quant firm. The bar is set very high regardless of the specific path.
Does XTX hire interns or new graduates?
Yes. XTX runs a competitive summer internship program for both quantitative researchers and engineers, and many full-time graduate hires come through it. The internship interview process mirrors the full-time process in difficulty, and successful interns typically receive return offers.
What programming languages does XTX use?
The production trading systems are written primarily in modern C++ on Linux, with significant use of Python for research, data analysis, and tooling. Researchers typically work in Python and increasingly in PyTorch and JAX for GPU-accelerated modeling, with results productionized in the C++ trading stack by engineers.
Is XTX a good place to work compared to other quant firms?
XTX is consistently rated among the best places to work in quantitative finance. It is known for top-of-market compensation, a flat and intellectually serious culture, long-tenured employees, a research-first orientation, and a principled stance against predatory trading strategies. The trade-off is that the firm is small, the bar is extreme, and there is little room for generalists or careerists.
How long does the XTX interview process take?
From application to offer, the process typically takes between three and six weeks for active candidates. The online assessment is usually scheduled within a week of application, followed by a phone or video screen, and then a single intensive on-site or virtual on-site day. XTX is known for moving quickly and decisively once they identify a candidate they want.
Does XTX sponsor visas?
Yes. XTX regularly sponsors UK Skilled Worker visas for its London office and supports relocation for hires from around the world. The firm has a long track record of bringing in international talent, including via its Yerevan and Mumbai offices, and visa support is standard for offers that require it.
What is the culture like at XTX Markets?
The culture is often described as a research department rather than a trading floor: quiet, focused, collegial, and intensely meritocratic. There is no dress code, minimal hierarchy, and very little internal politics. Employees are expected to own their work end to end and to engage seriously with the firm's principled stance on responsible market making.
Who founded XTX Markets and who owns it?
XTX was founded in 2015 by Alex Gerko, a Russian-born British mathematician and former partner at GSA Capital, alongside a small founding team. The firm remains privately owned and has never accepted external capital. Gerko is one of the largest individual taxpayers and philanthropists in the United Kingdom, with substantial donations to mathematics education and humanitarian causes.
Open Positions
XTX Markets currently has 8 open positions.
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