Squarepoint Capital

Speaking as someone who was in the Technology side:

• SquarePoint hires a lot of post-graduate developers, it's a really nice entrance to Finance and Electronic trading.
• (This hugely depends on the team you are in) You would get involved immediately by doing tickets, this gives you the opportunity to learn from practice.
• A lot of offices and a company growing fast. The company is making a name for itself (Although now not for the good reasons).
• The only company that I know of that would contribute 10% to your pension.

Squarepoint used to be a very nice company that had many good advantages while expanding, however it got very bad during the Covid period. I wouldn't recommend to anyone that isn't a Junior. If I had to sum-up the biggest negative points:

• Working 50 hours a week during first lockdown.
• Squarepoint decided that the second wave (September 2020 and onward) of Covid that the lockdown "didn't applied" to them and began constantly harassing their employees to come to the office 4 days a week. A lot of people felt uncomfortable to ask personal "exemption" to this new policy. Middle-management strangely didn't step into the office for another half-year.
• The period of bonus and raise after Covid was terrible all-across the board. Some people even got close to nothing while this year was the second best of the company.
• Middle-management seems to have issues with reporting to upper-management (I'm saying seems because some people are very good at it! And I hope you'll get to work with them). The solution from the upper-management was to enforce more engineers/middle-management meetings, which was just you and your manager reading the same 5 bullet-points quarterly.
• Progression internally is very difficult if there is no specific opening. I personally wasn't looking for it.
• Squarepoint salaries, bonuses, and benefits are not competitive anymore. They are desperately trying to hire people to make up for all the people that left after Covid (reasons I explained above). If you wish to try a finance company/enjoy the pay bump for your career, go for it, but don't expect to stick in Squarepoint.

To upper-management:

Share some of your profits with your lowest echelon. It's not normal to get raised lower than inflation while working on critical components.

Some middle-managers are knowingly ignoring your guidelines to make up more achievements in their team, and sometimes take the merits for themselves.