Meet 7 recruiters who can help you land a tech job at Wall Street firms like JPMorgan and Blackstone
Andy Legg, Riviera Partners
Title: Director, quant, tech, and AI
Specialty: Quantitative technology and AI
Clients: Multi-strat hedge funds, asset managers, high-frequency trading shops, electronic market makers
Andy Legg is a relatively new face at Riviera Partners, but he’s been placing top tech talent on Wall Street for 10 years.
At Riviera, Legg helps lead the boutique firm’s quantitative technology and AI practice. He’s focused on transferring brain share between Big Tech and Wall Street, which is something he’s been passionate about since placing his first machine learning engineer with a hedge fund in 2013.
“The rise of machine learning, data science, data engineering into finance, which really from that period on over the last 10 years, there’s been a greater and greater demand for that technical skillset,” Legg said. “There is this belief that those types of engineers have existed outside of finance and therefore, that’s the skill set that many, many funds or clients of ours are chasing,” he said.
To truly stand out from the crowd, candidates should flex the commercial outcomes of their work. That could include reducing the latency of a trading system by some number of seconds a day, or building a machine learning solution that generates revenue, Legg said.
It makes sense that Legg would want to see the combination of “technical chops” and “commercial mindset.” Before joining Riviera Partners in January, Legg worked as an in-house recruiter at hedge funds, which can be meticulous about justifying tech spend with commercial impact. He held stints at Point72, AQR Capital Management, and Two Sigma, among others.