AI trading firm paying £2.8m per head hired a Google Deepmind director in London

27 November 2025

3 minute read

There are plenty of quant trading powerhouses in London, but few are as quiet and lucrative as Quadrature. The "automated trading" firm paid £2.8m per head to its 173 employees last year and has continued to grow in 2025. It has hired multiple senior technologists recently, including a director from one of the hottest AI companies.

Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️

Salvatore Scellato announced last week that he was joining Quadrature as its head of research technology after a six and a half year stint at DeepMind, Google's London-based AI lab leading some of its work on Gemini. He was a director of engineering at DeepMind, where he was "building a world-class experimentation and research platform" for its researchers. Scellato, a PhD computer scientist from Cambridge, also spent seven years at DeepMind's parent company where he was a machine learning tech lead.

DeepMind staff are in high-demand both in and outside of finance. Hedge fund Balyasny and rival prop firm Jane Street have each hired from DeepMind this year, while Mark Zuckerberg personally contacted DeepMind people as he was building out his Meta AI lab in 2024. Quadrature previously hired DeepMind alum Laurent Mazare in 2023, but he left after just four months to found an AI startup.

At Quadrature, Scellato will be working with some pretty powerful infrastructure. As of June, the firm had "over 20,000 CPU cores, 2,000 GPUs, 500TB of RAM and 10PB of storage." This would imply that Quadrature has over 11 GPUs per employee; Jane Street, for reference, has over 5,000 GPUs, but ~3,000 employees.

Quadrature has also been hiring technologists native to financial services. In September, it hired Ian Bashford as its head of reference data after eight years at Millennium spinoff WorldQuant where he held the same role. Bashford joined in Quadrature's new-ish New York office.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 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.