India’s high-speed trading firms are offering record internship pay as they compete fiercely for scarce quantitative and engineering talent
India’s high-speed trading firms are offering record salaries to interns as they compete for a small pool of engineers and quantitative talent capable of building complex trading models and executing trades at lightning speed.
An internship in India can now come with a monthly pay cheque of as much as Rs 30 lakh.
Gurugram-based high-frequency trading firm Quadeye is offering some interns Rs 30 lakh a month, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The firm is paying Rs 60 lakh for a typical two-month internship, the report said.
The package is about four times what Quadeye was offering interns a year earlier, highlighting the intensifying competition among high-speed trading firms for India’s best quantitative talent.
For perspective, Rs 30 lakh a month works out to Rs 3.6 crore a year if annualised, although an internship lasting two months would pay Rs 60 lakh.
Why are trading firms paying so much?
The answer lies in a specialised talent pool. High-speed trading firms rely on mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists who can develop algorithms, analyse enormous quantities of market data and build systems capable of executing trades in fractions of a second.
These employees can directly influence a firm’s ability to make money in financial markets. A small improvement in a trading model or execution speed can potentially generate significant returns when a strategy is deployed across thousands or millions of trades.
More from BusinessThat makes India’s top engineering students particularly valuable.
Firms compete for candidates with strong mathematical and programming skills, often identifying potential recruits through internships before they graduate.
Quadeye’s own careers page says it looks for candidates with strong mathematical and programming abilities and recruits for roles including quantitative trading and research.
A fourfold jump in internship pay
The latest reported offer from Quadeye marks a sharp increase from last year.
The firm is understood to be paying Rs 60 lakh for a two-month internship, compared with about Rs 15 lakh for a similar stint a year earlier.
The escalation reflects a broader battle among proprietary and high-frequency trading firms to recruit India’s strongest quantitative candidates.
The compensation being offered by these firms can be substantially higher than traditional campus placements, including at some of India’s largest technology companies.
The surge in pay comes at a time when India’s once-booming derivatives market is facing regulatory pressure.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has introduced a series of measures aimed at curbing excessive retail participation in equity derivatives and reducing the risks associated with speculative options trading.
The measures have included increasing the minimum contract size for index derivatives, limiting weekly expiries and tightening margin-related requirements.
These changes have affected derivatives activity, particularly among individual traders.
According to SEBI data, the number of individual traders in equity derivatives fell about 20 per cent in fiscal 2026. Individual traders have also continued to report significant losses in the segment.
The regulatory changes have therefore created a more challenging environment for parts of India’s derivatives ecosystem.
Yet high-speed trading firms continue to invest heavily in technology and talent.
The search for the next trading edge
For these firms, the changing market environment makes sophisticated technology potentially even more important.
Trading strategies that worked during India’s derivatives boom may not deliver the same returns after regulatory changes. Firms therefore need researchers and engineers who can analyse new patterns, identify opportunities across markets and adapt algorithms quickly.
The shortage of obvious artificial-intelligence-linked investment opportunities in India’s equity market is another factor pushing firms to look for increasingly sophisticated ways to generate returns.
Unlike traditional investors, high-frequency trading firms do not necessarily need a stock to rise over several years to make money. Their strategies can seek small price differences and market inefficiencies across very short periods.
That puts a premium on speed, mathematical modelling and computing infrastructure.
Why interns matter
The extraordinary internship packages are not simply about attracting temporary workers.
Internships are effectively becoming an early recruitment pipeline for India’s high-speed trading industry.
A successful intern can be offered a full-time role after graduation, potentially leading to compensation packages worth several times those available in conventional campus recruitment.
The firms also get an opportunity to assess candidates in real-world trading environments before making long-term hiring decisions.
For students, the competition offers an unusual opportunity: a two-month internship can potentially pay more than what many professionals earn in a year.
But the jobs are also highly selective. Candidates are typically expected to demonstrate advanced problem-solving ability, mathematics, probability, statistics and programming skills.
