The battle for entry-level talent is getting expensive. And it’s starting before graduates even enter the workforce. Wall Street trading firm Susquehanna International Group is dangling an eye-popping offer for master’s and PhD interns: $8,600 a week—or $86,000 total over a 10-week summer program.
The postings are specifically for 2027 quantitative trader and quantitative research roles in its New York and Philadelphia offices, according to job listings.
Less experienced undergraduate interns can still earn around $7,600 a week, depending on the position, with signing bonuses potentially added on top.
The pay is striking in comparison to the median U.S. worker, who earned about $1,235 per week during the first quarter of this year—meaning they would have to work nearly two months to earn what SIG interns earn in one week.
The compensation comes despite Wall Street’s reputation for long hours and relentless pressure. To sweeten the deal, interns also receive free housing, complimentary breakfast and lunch, and access to social events ranging from poker tournaments and dinners to sporting events.
The perks in part are a reflection of SIG’s own unconventional beginnings. The firm can trace its roots back to the late 1970s when six college students—including future billionaires Jeff Yass and Arthur Dantchik—met at Binghamton University and later founded the company. Decades later, the company continues to invest heavily in students, offering aspiring talent the resources needed to build careers in a highly competitive industry.
Lavish pay is a staple across Wall Street: interns are bringing home thousands each week—but landing a spot is tough
SIG’s intern salaries are eye-catching, but lavish pay has become standard across the industry’s top trading firms as they compete for elite quantitative talent. Jane Street, for example, is advertising summer intern pay as $300,000 annually, (but it’s just for three months and paid pro rata to roughly $5,700 a week), while interns at Citadel and Citadel Securities receive around $4,300 to $5,800 weekly in base salary, which is dependent on their job and professional experience.
The catch? Landing one of those positions is even harder than getting into Ivy League schools.
Goldman Sachs has said its internship acceptance rate has remained below 1% for three consecutive years, making the programs among the most competitive in corporate America.
“I think the selection rate speaks both to the strength of the opportunity and the caliber of talent we’re attracting globally,” Jacqueline Arthur, Goldman’s head of human capital management, previously told Fortune, adding that roughly 40% of the bank’s partners began as campus hires.
The escalating pay also highlights a growing divide in the AI labor market. Over the past few years, some of the technology industry’s most prominent executives—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—have warned that generative AI could sharply reduce demand for entry-level white-collar workers, and many Gen Z have become more pessimistic than ever about the futures.
At the same time, companies are spending unprecedented sums to recruit a small pool of engineers and researchers capable of building cutting-edge AI systems. Some compensation packages have been worth tens of millions of dollars, and in some cases, even into nine figures. Among the most prominent examples is ScaleAI founder Alexander Wang, the 29-year-old college dropout who reportedly received a package from Meta exceeding $100 million.
While Wall Street isn’t likely to be offering that type of money for entry-level talent anytime soon, firms are increasingly willing to stretch their pocketbooks further than before to secure the analytical problem-solvers they believe will power the next generation of trading.
