How to get a job at Millennium, the hedge fund paying $100m

If you're serious about wanting to work for a hedge fund, you'll be familiar with Millennium Management. One of the biggest multistrategy hedge funds, Millennium has a reputation for paying extremely generously. Getting a job there is predictably hard. 

At the top end, Millennium has been associated with packages of $100m, which is the amount it allegedly offered Steve Schurr, a senior portfolio manager at a rival fund, to move there earlier this year. $100m is crazy money. Some of that will have covered Schurr's deferred bonuses at his former employer (Balyasny) and the cost of hiring a new team at Millennium, but still. 

Millennium is constantly on the lookout for people like Schurr to manage its $79bn of assets under management. The firm is small compared to a bank; it employs 6,300 people in total, of whom only around 3,000 are portfolio managers and other investment staff, but it interviews new people constantly.  

Millennium declined to comment for this article, but writing in June, the Wall Street Journal said the fund conducts 3,000 interviews a year for its senior portfolio and portfolio manager jobs. Only a small fraction of the people it interviews are successful. 

How do you even get into an interview? Traders who've interviewed with Millennium say they've typically been approached in one of three ways: through headhunters, through former colleagues, or by Millennium's own business development professionals. 

In each of these cases, though, getting a portfolio management job at Millennium involves the same thing: you need to be an extremely good trader, capable of running a pod (investment strategy) with at least $200m of assets (if you're a senior portfolio manager), while generating returns with a Sharpe ratio of 2.6 or above (indicating a good risk adjusted return) and losing less than 5% at any one time in the process. 

If this is you, Millennium will already have you on its radar.  

"You need to have a reputation as a good trader," says one senior portfolio manager who spent some time there. "They will approach you through their business development professionals, and they will want to know about your track record in a lot of granularity - your pnl, your Sharpe, your drawdowns and how your strategies react in different market environments. If you're coming from a bank, they will also want to know if they can split your PnL from the PnL generated by the bank's franchise." 

In some cases, he says Millennium will want to see the performance of a sample portfolio, Critically, he says it's about sizing: you might be able to make money investing $10m, but can you reliably make low-risk money on a pod of $1bn?

Because Millennium is less centralized than rival Citadel, interviews there can be variable. Once a senior portfolio manager has been hired by Millennium to run a pod, insiders say the senior portfolio manager (PM) will often source and interview junior portfolio managers and analysts themselves. Huge packages of $100m for senior PMs reflect the cost of building out these teams.

Millennium has 320 investment teams ("pods") in total, and they operate relatively autonomously, so each senior portfolio manager will have his or her own interview technique. Senior portfolio managers will often tap their own networks of individuals they've worked with in the past. "A colleague I worked with 15 years ago heard I was good, and he called me up," says one trader who joined the fund.

Not everyone at Millennium is a senior portfolio manager, portfolio manager or analyst, though. While half of the firm's staff are investment staff, the other half work in roles like quantitative engineering, operations, data, execution trading (placing the trades), technology and other support roles. 

These kinds of jobs pay far less than those of portfolio managers. They are also open to junior employees. Like other hedge funds, Millennium runs internship programs. It also operates a graduate program for equity analysts in conjunction with UBS equity research, plus a quant research analyst program, a machine learning and data analyst program (in Miami), and hires graduates for areas like compliance.  These programs are not easy to get into. This year, for example, Millennium accepted 190 interns; 50,000 people applied. 

Once you've joined Millennium, you may not last, particularly as a portfolio manager. The firm is famous for imposing strict limits on drawdowns (losses). If you lose 5% there, you'll usually get your capital allocation cut. If you lose 7.5% you'll be out.

This sounds harsh, but portfolio managers say it makes sense. "They're a good firm," says one. "If they can bet on you, they will hire you. But if you and your team don't make money, they will shut the pod. That's the game. The rules are very, very clear." 

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