Goldman Sachs MD that quit for Stripe is now a hedge fund AI head
A lot of people have been leaving stripe in 2025, and it's not just because of its layoffs. The fintech also had one of its marquee hires from traditional finance leave after two and half years to join a hedge fund.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
Vladimir Zhukov, head of AI and machine learning at Stripe, has joined Steve Cohen's hedge fund Point72 in New York as head of technology for AI, machine learning and data. Zhukov initially joined Stripe as head of growth and core data from Goldman Sachs, where he was global head of data science and machine learning for two years.
Zhukov was a part of the wave of AWS technologists who joined banking in the early 2020s. He was a director at the cloud technology firm, running its machine learning data science platform Sagemaker.
Point72 has been losing some of its AI people too in 2025. Sameer Gupta, the fund's head of data solutions, left for private equity to become chief data and analytics officer of Apollo.
Zhukov leaves Stripe as it continues to grow, but the payments fintech has faced controversy when cutting staff this week. In a botched email, laid off staff were sent an incorrect termination date and... a PDF photo of a duck.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). 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: all our comments are moderated 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. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
