A London electronic trading firm opened a Dallas office and people are leaving
It's been a while since we wrote about G-Research, the secretive trading firm formed in 2012 by Ben Leadsom, the husband of Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom. Last time we looked, however, it was allegedly paying its London interns $200k (£165k) salaries and employed around 800 people in an office off London's Tottenham Court Road.
Times have changed. G-Research didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but three years on it appears to have around 200 more people, to be less secretive, and to have an entirely new 'engineering and infrastructure hub' in Dallas.
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It's not clear when G-Research opened its Dallas office, but since July it's made tens of new software engineering hires there, drawing people from the likes of AWS, Bank of America, the Federal government, Meta and Zoom.
While G-Research's arrival in Texas may be good news for Dallas, however, it seems to be less favorable for London, where lucrative jobs are disappearing. Sources at the firm claim that following a series of layoffs in February, jobs are increasingly being pushed to Dallas. The firm is currently advertising around 15 jobs in Dallas, including a head of software engineering services and (another) recruiter. In London, it's looking for software engineering interns and machine learning specialists, but most of its tech job openings seem to be far across the Atlantic.
As Dallas expands, there have been departures in London. Adnan Rashid, a senior cloud engineer, left for hedge fund Verition in October. Geoff Quigley, a manager in Linux platform engineering has just gone to Millennium. Max Bowsher, a Linux engineer who left in February, joined XTX in July.
One of the other beneficiaries of G-Research's changes is Eisler Capital, the "intellectually honest" hedge fund that has experienced various staff departures of its own. In June, Eisler hired David Ainsworth from G-Research as head of data engineering, based in London. It's also hired David Adeboye, a data engineer who left G-Research on a non-compete in December and joined in April. Ainsworth is thought to be building a team.
Dallas is becoming a popular location for financial services technology jobs. Goldman Sachs, for example, has leased an 800,000 square foot office in Dallas and is building a technology hub there.
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