The Istanbul Pipeline: Why Global Hedge Funds Are Hiring Turkish Quantitative Finance Graduates

In September 2023, Deniz Aydin started her first day as a quantitative researcher at Two Sigma Investments in New York. She was twenty-four years old. Her path there (a double major in mathematics and economics from Bogazici University, a master's in computational finance from Sabanci, a summer internship at Optiver in Amsterdam, and a final-round offer from Two Sigma after a five-stage interview process that included a live coding test, a probability exam, and a portfolio construction case study) was gruelling but not, among her cohort, unusual. Of the twelve students in Sabanci's 2022 computational finance master's class, eight took roles outside Turkey within six months of graduation. Three went to quantitative trading firms. Two joined investment banks in London. One took a data science role at a Silicon Valley technology company. Aydin's former study partner Baris Celik joined Citadel Securities' London desk in January 2024, recruited directly through a campus presentation that Citadel held at Bogazici's South Campus auditorium in the spring of 2023, one of only four non-US, non-UK universities where Citadel conducted on-campus recruiting that year. That last detail is worth sitting with: Citadel, the most selective quantitative trading firm in the world, puts Bogazici on a recruiting list alongside MIT, Cambridge, and ETH Zurich.

The stories of Aydin and Celik are individual, but the pattern they represent is a testament to what Turkey's universities have built. Over the past five years, the country's leading institutions have emerged as a significant and growing source of quantitative finance talent for the world's most selective hedge funds and proprietary trading firms. The numbers, compiled from LinkedIn data and university placement reports, are striking. Bogazici's Industrial Engineering and Mathematics departments have sent at least 45 graduates to quantitative finance roles at firms including Citadel, DE Shaw, Jane Street, Optiver, and Jump Trading since 2019. Bilkent's Mathematics and Computer Science programmes account for another 30-odd placements. Sabanci's Financial Engineering master's programme, the most explicitly quant-oriented in Turkey, reports that over 60% of its graduates since 2020 have taken roles in quantitative finance and algorithmic trading. These are not mid-tier placements. These are the firms that reject 99% of applicants, the firms where a mathematics PhD from Princeton is the baseline, not the advantage. The fact that Turkish undergraduates are competing successfully in those pools is a remarkable achievement for the country's higher education system.

Why Turkey? The question is worth asking with precision, because the answer reveals something important about the quality of Turkish education. Turkey's top universities teach mathematics with a rigour and abstraction that is closer to the Eastern European and Russian tradition than to the more applied Anglo-American approach. A Bogazici mathematics graduate will have taken courses in measure theory, functional analysis, and stochastic calculus that would be considered graduate-level at many American universities. This mathematical depth, combined with increasingly strong computer science training and, critically, fluent English instruction at all three institutions, produces graduates who arrive at quantitative finance interviews with a technical foundation that recruiters describe, consistently, as "two to three years ahead" of comparable candidates from mid-tier American or Western European programmes. The comparison with India and China is instructive. India's IITs have been feeding Wall Street's quantitative desks for decades, and the scale of the Indian pipeline dwarfs Turkey's by an order of magnitude. China's Tsinghua, Peking, and Fudan produce extraordinary mathematical talent. But Turkish graduates benefit from a cultural proximity to Europe and America, and a fluency in Western institutional norms, that reduces the friction of integration in ways that matter in the intensely collaborative environment of a modern quant trading floor. Published placement data from all three universities indicates that global firms are increasing, not decreasing, their recruiting activity in Istanbul.

The international success of Turkish graduates is also beginning to generate a domestic dividend. A growing number of alumni at firms like Two Sigma, Citadel, and DE Shaw maintain active connections to Turkey's financial community, mentoring younger graduates and, in some cases, advising Istanbul-based firms on quantitative strategies. Meanwhile, a small but expanding cohort of domestic quantitative trading firms has emerged in Istanbul, offering compensation structures modelled on London and New York norms. At least two firms are now paying first-year quantitative traders in excess of 5 million TL, with performance-linked bonuses that can double or triple that figure. These firms are still small, employing perhaps 50 people combined, but they represent something genuinely new in the Turkish financial landscape: institutions built around the same technical rigour that the international firms demand. The broader domestic opportunity is growing too. TEFAS, Turkey's electronic fund distribution platform, has expanded the asset management market significantly, and as the fund industry moves toward more sophisticated strategies, the demand for quantitative talent in Istanbul is rising. Turkey's pension funds, now exceeding one trillion TL in assets, are beginning to allocate to quantitative and systematic strategies that require exactly the skill set that Bogazici, Bilkent, and Sabanci produce.

The virtuous cycle is becoming visible. Turkish universities produce world-class quantitative talent. That talent succeeds at the highest levels of global finance, building networks and reputations that enhance the next generation's prospects. International firms deepen their recruiting in Turkey, which signals the quality of the programmes, which attracts stronger students, which produces stronger graduates. And as Istanbul's own quantitative finance ecosystem grows, fed by returning alumni, rising compensation, and expanding institutional demand, the domestic opportunity begins to close some of the gap with London and New York. Deniz Aydin is at Two Sigma. Baris Celik is at Citadel. The next cohort of Bogazici mathematicians is preparing for campus recruiting season. Turkey should be proud of what its universities produce. Increasingly, it has reason to be optimistic about what it can build at home.