A post by Alex Gerko, founder of XTX Markets, on his LinkedIn account. LinkedIn screenshot

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This is an internship recruitment post uploaded by Alex Gerko, founder and CEO of the British algorithmic trading company XTX Markets, on LinkedIn. The position is for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research assistant, with a contract period of 12 to 14 weeks (about 3 months). Even as an intern, successful applicants will receive a monthly salary about five times higher than the average full-time employee in New York City. XTX Markets’ internship recruitment has drawn attention from major foreign media outlets such as the Financial Times (FT), as well as international online communities.

XTX Market Homepage

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XTX Markets is a company that serves as a major liquidity provider in the stock, ETF, and foreign exchange markets, based on AI algorithms. Russian-born British financier Gerko founded the company in London in 2015, and in just ten years, it has rapidly grown to become the world’s third-largest foreign exchange trading firm.

The main work is somewhat different from that of typical financial companies. This is because most investment tasks are handled by AI rather than humans. The company processes $250 billion (about 350 trillion won) in liquidity every day, yet employs only 250 people, most of whom are not traders but work in research and development. The company’s job listings are dominated by roles such as software engineers, FPGA (specialized communication chip) developers, and data center operators, making its structure closer to that of a tech company.

List of job postings registered on the official website of XTX Market. Most positions are related to data centers and technology development, with only one internship available in the finance sector. Screenshot of XTX Market

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Of course, other trading firms also utilize "quantitative trading," where computers repeatedly execute trades based on pre-programmed algorithms. However, XTX Markets is different in that it generates profits by having deep learning AI, trained on specialized financial data, directly predict future prices and execute trades. Unlike simple algorithmic trading, which merely repeats commands, XTX Markets’ AI can assess situations independently and respond flexibly to various scenarios.

The large-scale Chinese language model DeepSeek was developed by the hedge fund Huanfang Quant. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News.

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With this investment strategy, XTX Markets achieved an operating profit of 1.3 billion pounds (about 2.4 trillion won) last year. The Anglo-American developer salary information community "Levels.fyi" reports the average annual salary of XTX Markets employees as $630,000 (about 875 million won).

Having succeeded in the financial sector with its price prediction AI, XTX Markets began to fully engage in the AI business last year. It established the XTY Labs research institute to develop various AIs and is aggressively recruiting talent in the UK, the US, and other countries. The official website’s internship description specifies that the goal of XTY Labs is "to apply machine learning technology to financial data," and states, "We welcome students who aspire to expand the boundaries of AI and participate in cutting-edge, high-risk, high-reward research projects."

XTX Markets is not the only financial company that has achieved outstanding results through AI. The large-scale Chinese language model (LLM) DeepSeek, which outperformed state-of-the-art AI models at a lower development cost, was also developed by the hedge fund Huanfang Quant. Like XTX Markets, Huanfang Quant is a company that develops deep learning AI for market price prediction, and DeepSeek originated as a "side project" while seeking ways to utilize surplus graphics processing units (GPUs).

As AI spreads across various industries, the value of AI engineers is also soaring. The average annual salary of AI engineers in the United States is $145,080 as of 2025. Getty Images Bank

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As AI expands beyond chatbots and computer programming into various traditional industries such as finance and manufacturing, the value of AI engineers is also soaring. According to average annual salary data by job category compiled by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary of AI engineers in the United States is $145,080 as of 2025. This is 2.2 times higher than the overall average annual salary of $65,470 across all job categories.

There are also warnings that the current trend could harm the majority of workers who lack AI-related job skills. Like XTX Markets, which achieves results comparable to giant financial firms with only a few hundred employees, AI-centric companies are being criticized for focusing on maximizing profits rather than creating jobs. British computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said in an interview with the Financial Times on September 5, "As AI automation replaces general job categories, corporate profits will increase, but instead, massive unemployment will occur," adding, "Rather than solving humanity’s poverty, AI is being used as a tool to concentrate wealth among the elite."