Hedge funds will rarely join the H1B visa lottery, even for top quants

If you work at a hedge fund or trading firm in the US, there's a decent chance that you'll be working alongside someone on a H1B visa. The chances of them having gotten that visa through your firm, however, are much lower. Multiple senior recruiters in the financial services space say that hedge funds and quant firms refuse to participate in the H1B Visa process, regardless of the candidate. 

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If you're unaware of the process, there are a limited number of H1B Visas, which are awarded only to people hired in specialist roles and assigned via a lottery. Because of the lottery, a senior quant headhunter in New York, speaking anonymously, says "the process will never start. It takes too long, and there's no guarantee you'll win, so they're not even going to interview you." Manuella Supiot, founder of recruiting firm CRX, says "countless interview processes have been aborted" over visa concerns. Another headhunter says that even excellent candidates who were fast tracked during the interview process have been rejected over H1B-visa risks.

And yet, if you look at the H1B Visa salary database, you'll see a great deal of employees working at top hedge funds and trading firms. Electronic trading firm Jane Street submitted salaries for 25 employees on H1B visas in 2024, for example, while various entities for hedge fund Point72 submitted a collective 63 salaries. These include both new hires and previously hired H1B employees having their visa extended.

So how do these firms get their H1B staff? The New York-based headhunter says "firms will hire you if there's at least 1 year left on your H1B Visa" as they'll have time to transfer over the visa to another type, extend their H1B, or apply for a Green Card. There can be complications which could force them to move that employee to a different office, but the headhunter says "they will have a year or so of experience with the person to know if they want to bother." Usually, these H1Bs will come from multinational companies or consultancies who apply for "many" and employ lottery losers in their native country.

Some firms do seem willing to apply for H1B Visas, however. Felix Bauckholt, a quant trader involved in a shootout on the Canadian border earlier this year, was allegedly given a H1B Visa in 2022 to work as a quant trader for Tower Research Capital, although he had already been working for the firm since 2021. Other reports allege Bauckholt was instead on a different type of visa, however: an O1-A. A representative for Tower Research did not respond to a request for comment.

H1B visa employees have faced a lot of criticism over the stereotype that H1B visa employees are exploited by companies to hire low-cost employees. Elon Musk, who supports the system in premise, has called it "broken and [in need of] major reform." Recruiters say the stereotype doesn't apply to H1Bs in finance. The New York headhunter says H1B hires "are a matter of finding the best talent wherever it is. Any cost benefit would come from hiring quants overseas and having them work offshore." H1B hires in these firms are on salaries well above the minimum rate that Musk wants to raise; the average salary of Jane Street's H1B Visa hires in 2024 was $241.5k. 

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