Do I have a chance for HFT/algo trading job after ML Ph.D. in a German university?

[stochastic_descent]

Hi all,

I'm a last year Ph.D. student in ML at good German university, which unfortunately is in ~150th place in CS rankings, but on the other hand, with stellar advisor (h-index ~60, more than 50k citations). I'm interested in HFT/algotrading jobs after my graduation, since I don't like the potential research that I will do in the FAAMGs, but from every side I hear that I stand no chance for those jobs since my Ph.D. is not from "top 10 university".

My current situation is as follows:
- 4 first author publications at most prestigious ML conferences (1x NeurIPS, 1x ICML, and 2x CVPR) (acceptance rate around ~20%).
- 6 month research internship in Nvidia AI.
- Excellent knowledge of stats, probabilities and ML theory.
- 8 years of experience working with Python and ML/math optimization stack, including developing distributed deep learning models that run on >32 GPUs.

Is my profile at least a bit competitive for places like Jane Street/Citadel Securities/Akuna/IMC e.t.c. or am I going to be skipped because of "no name" university? I tried to look at our alumni network, and unfortunately almost everyone ended up in FAAMG or academia so I don't know anyone inside those places.

Thank you for answering!

P.S. I'd like to aim for "Quantiative Researcher/ML Researcher" positions at those companies.

 

[KillingField]

Most likely yes, your CV is fine, but what about the physical location? US can be difficult due to visa requirements, so London (or Amsterdam), I suppose?

 

[stochastic_descent]

I'm open to both USA and Europe, and I actually saw that some companies have directly stated that they will consider non-US residents for job positions. But I guess at this point I will just apply once I will be ready for job search and see how it goes. I was just really afraid that I will spend some time for quant interview preparation (since from the internet they seem to be quite different to ML interviews in tech sector) and in the end will be rejected because of the "university issue".