"Three Months' Work for 144 Million KRW" Shocking Internship Recruitment Notice [Tech Talk]

Monthly Salary of 48 Million KRW for a 3-Month Internship
XTX Markets Solidifies Its Position in the Financial Market with AI
Most Employees Are AI Specialists

"Interns Wanted. Monthly Salary: $35,000 (approximately 48 million KRW)"

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

This is an internship recruitment post uploaded to LinkedIn by Alex Gerko, CEO and founder of the British algorithmic trading company XTX Markets. The position is for AI research assistance, with a contract period of 12 to 14 weeks (about three months). Even as an intern, successful candidates will receive about five times the average monthly salary of a full-time worker in New York City. The XTX Markets internship posting has attracted attention not only from overseas online communities but also from major international media outlets such as the Financial Times (FT).

A Trading Company Earning 2 Trillion KRW Annually, Paying Hundreds of Millions in Annual Salaries for AI Talent

XTX Markets acts 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 one of the world’s top three foreign exchange trading firms.

The core work differs somewhat from that of traditional financial firms. This is because AI, not humans, handles most of the investment work. While the company processes $250 billion (about 350 trillion KRW) in liquidity daily, it employs only 250 people, most of whom are in research and development rather than trading roles. A look at the company’s job listings reveals that most positions are for software engineers, FPGA (specialized communication chip) developers, and data center operators, reflecting a structure more akin to 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

Of course, other trading firms also use "quantitative trading," where computers repeatedly execute trades based on pre-programmed algorithms. However, XTX Markets is different in that its deep learning AI, trained on specialized financial data, predicts future prices and executes trades directly to generate profits. Unlike simple algorithmic trading, which merely repeats commands, this approach allows the AI to make its own judgments and respond flexibly to various situations, which is the key advantage.

With this investment strategy, XTX Markets posted an operating profit of 1.3 billion pounds (about 2.4 trillion KRW) last year. According to the Anglo-American developer salary information community "Levels.fyi," the average annual salary of an XTX Markets employee is $630,000 (about 875 million KRW).

AI Penetrates the Financial Industry... Concerns Over "Massive Unemployment"

After achieving success in the financial sector with price prediction AI, XTX Markets fully launched its AI business last year. The company established XTY Labs, a research institute developing various AI technologies, and is aggressively recruiting talent in the UK, US, and elsewhere. The official website’s internship description states that the goal of XTY Labs is "to apply machine learning technologies to financial data," and welcomes students "who aspire to push the boundaries of AI and participate in cutting-edge, high-risk, high-reward research projects."

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

XTX Markets is not the only financial firm to achieve exceptional results through AI. Previously, the large-scale Chinese language model DeepSeek, which outperformed cutting-edge 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 was created as a "side project" while seeking ways to utilize surplus graphics processing units (GPUs).

As AI expands beyond chatbots and computer programming into various traditional industries such as finance and manufacturing, the market value of AI engineers is also soaring. According to average annual salary data by occupation from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for AI engineers in the US is $145,080 as of 2025. This is 2.2 times higher than the overall occupational average of $65,470.

There are also warnings that the current trend could negatively impact the majority of workers who lack AI-related job skills. Like XTX Markets, which achieves results comparable to large financial firms with only a few hundred employees, AI-centric companies are being criticized for focusing on maximizing profits rather than job creation. On September 5, British computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said in an interview with the FT, "As AI automation replaces general job categories, corporate profits will increase, but massive unemployment will follow," adding, "Instead of solving humanity’s poverty, AI may actually become a tool that concentrates wealth among the elite."