How to get a job with Jeffrey Yan, the 30-year-old algo developer generating $100m per head
30-year-old Jeffrey Yan is having a moment. A post on Twitter/X yesterday noting that Yan is generating $1.1bn in income with only 11 employees has already had nearly 500,000 views. Jane Street's $33m of revenues per head suddenly look low by comparison.
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Yan runs Hyperliquid, the self-described 'Blockchain to house all finance.' Users can build their own projects and exchange assets on Hyperliquid's decentralised perpetual futures exchange where - unlike at FTX - they half self-custody of their investments. It's a great success: Bloomberg noted in May that Hyperliquid's daily trading volumes went from almost nothing in 2023, to $30bn earlier this year.
Before Yan worked for Hyperliquid, he briefly worked as an algorithm developer for Hudson River Trading (HRT), the electronic trading firm known for paying $500k to junior engineers. HRT itself generated $3.7bn in revenues with 1,000 employees in the third quarter. Hyperliquid exceeds that too.
Speaking on a Podcast in August, Yan said his tiny team at Hyperliquid is comprised half of engineering and half of non-engineering professionals and that he might be hiring soon. It's not like Hyperliquid just wants to "stay super small", said Yan: "There's also a lot we could do better and we're always trying to hire the very best people." However, Yan said Hyperliquid is "very picky" when it recruits: "I quickly learned early on that hiring the wrong person is much worse than not hiring anyone at all."
Who is the right person? Yan said he likes, "very smart and driven people who have very high integrity and are genuinely passionate about what we're building." Yan himself won a gold medal in the international physics Olympiad twice when he was at high school; similar achievements might help.
Yan might also hire if you have a background at a top electronic trading firm like HRT. Speaking last month, Yan said working for HRT when he left Harvard University was "super cool:" "It was a basically a start-up vibe but doing trading stuff so I got to think about a lot of interesting math and learned about how to apply quantitative thinking to markets."
You don't have to actually work for Hyperliquid to work for Hyperliquid, though. The firm's success is partly due to its model of rewarding users with points when they develop and promote the protocol. 'Infamous influencer' Andrew Tate, has, for example, has earned $75k in referral fees.
Yan said last month that it's wrong to attribute Hyperliquid's success to its core of 11 people. "The team is not just just the core team. I I do want to make that clear," he told the podcast. "It's like I think the line there's often a clear line between the core developers of a protocol and the application developers on top. I do think the line is very fuzzy for Hyperliquid and we want to make it as fuzzy as possible..."
Hyperliquid's success has fundamentally come from treating people well, and getting them involved in building the product, said Yan. It's a friendly sort of platform. "If you treat the end users right, then I think the whole thing works out," he added. Some Reddit users might disagree, but for the moment it looks like a whole new business model.
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