As Jane Street and other prop trading firms expand in APAC, these are the new faces and new teams
Prop trading firms like Jane Street and Hudson River Trading have cemented themselves as Wall Street staples in recent years, posting record trading revenues and competing with banks that have headcounts many multiples larger than theirs. The top firms, many of whom already have a presence in APAC, have been building out their teams in the region.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
Hong Kong: Jane Street is scaling up
The most notable scale-up in Hong Kong is Jane Street, a market leading prop trader which has 400 people in Hong Kong. In April, the firm was reported to have been expanding to over 110,000 square feet of office space in the region, moving from 2.5 floors to 6 floors of office space. It could expand to 1,200 people as a result.
Jane Street's Hong Kong hires in 2025 include multiple recruiters, indicating more arrivals are on the horizon. Andrea Qi joined in April from Goldman Sachs, where she was a VP, while Arlene Wu joined in February after working in business development at Segantii Capital.
Jane Street's Hong Kong trading hires usually join after converting an internship. Graduates joining in 2025 have studied at various schools including Oxford, the National University of Singapore and HKUST.
Other trading firms are expanding in Hong Kong too; IMC Trading announced that it had expanded its own office space in the country just last month. Hires in the city have been sparse so far this year, but it hired quant researcher Chuanyou Li in July; he relocated from Chicago, where he was a quant at Jump Trading. There are only four current Hong Kong openings, mostly focused on commodities trading.
Jump Trading is expanding its own Hong Kong teams. Zoey Zhao, a former Citadel Securities quant, is continuing to hire in Hong Kong for her low/mid-frequency statistical arbitrage trading team. Job listings describe the team as "successful [and] global."
Singapore: Big recruitment hire
Hudson River Trading, said at the end of 2024 that it expanded both its Singapore and New York offices, but even HRT has hired sparingly in 2025. It brought in DRW's APAC lead for HR and talent acquisition, Ipsita Swain, in July and has added a handful of middle office and core development staff.
Australia: Optiver and Qube are hiring
Australia is a growing space for trading staff that prop firms have occupied for years. Optiver, for example, already had over 400 staff in Sydney at the time it completed its transition into a new office in the City this July.
Hiring for Optiver in 2025 has been mostly done at intern and graduate level in Sydney, but it has also been hiring both campus and experienced-level recruiters. Multiple graduate hires previously interned with Jane Street in Hong Kong. Other firms operating in the city include IMC Trading and Susquehanna.
The quant trading space in the region is still fairly nascent, but other firms outside of prop trading are helping it grow. Qube Research & Technologies, one of the fastest rising quant hedge funds, opened a Sydney office at the end of 2024 and has been hiring from trading firms, including IMC and Optiver.
India: Everyone is hiring!
India's quant trading space is maturing, not least because of the high profile dispute between Jane Street and Indian regulator SEBI. Firms are growing their offices across the country.
Optiver opened a Mumbai office last year and has since hired just under 50 employees in the city. The most senior people have been relocated rather than hired in; Gidon Jones, a partner at the firm, moved to the office from Shanghai and runs its Indian high-frequency trading team. Sahil Bahid, formerly based in London, became the firm's Indian head of index options trading in January. Senior hires often come from banking; Sankalp Malpani, formerly a Goldman Sachs VP, joined as an FPGA engineer in July while Anasua Chatterjee, an ex-Bank of America VP, joined its risk management team in June.
Citadel Securities, meanwhile, is growing an office in Gurguram. It hired ex-HSBC trader Suneet Kumar as its head of trading for India earlier this year.
Multiple trading firms, including Jump Trading and Tower Research, are reportedly opening offices in GIFT (Gujarat International Finance-Tec) City, although this appears to be influenced more by the more lax tax policy in the region rather than for its talent. More trading firms are thought to be weighing up a move to the city.
China: Virtu and others
A few electronic trading firms are also looking to build out in China, most notably Citadel Securities. The market maker is in the process of setting up a brokerage business there and is hiring local talent to do so, but has focused on junior hires to begin with.
Virtu Financial a publicly traded high-frequency trading firm, is also weighing up a move into China. Both firms are doing so after Chinese authorities were reported to be weighing up giving western market makers access to its ETF market. Huge teams in China are a while away for most firms, but it's still an area to keep an eye on.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently 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. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
Image Source: Envato
