Andy Legg, Riviera Partners
Riviera Partners
Position: Director, Quant, Technology, AI
Specialty: Quantitative technology and AI
Clients: Multi-Strat Hedge Funds, Asset Managers, High Frequency Trading Shops, Electronic Market Makers
Andy Legg is a relative newcomer to Riviera Partners, but he has spent a decade placing top technology talent on Wall Street.
At Riviera, Legg helps lead the boutique company’s quantitative technology and AI practices. He focuses on transferring brain share between Big Tech and Wall Street, a passion he has pursued since 2013, when he appointed his first machine learning engineer to a hedge fund.
“Machine learning, data science and data engineering have emerged in the financial sector, and really over the past decade, those technical skill sets have become more and more in demand,” Legg said. “The idea is that those types of engineers exist outside of finance, and so a lot of funds and our clients are pursuing that skill set,” he said.
To truly stand out from the crowd, candidates need to be flexible in leveraging the commercial results of their work. That could include reducing latency in trading systems by a few seconds per day, Legg said, or building machine learning solutions that generate revenue.
It’s no surprise that Legg wants to see a combination of “technical ability” and “commercial thinking”. Before he joined Riviera Partners in January, Mr. Legg worked as an internal recruiter at a hedge fund. Hedge funds can be very careful about justifying technology spending with commercial implications. He has worked at Point72, AQR Capital Management, Two Sigma, and others.
