Must you move to Poland to save your financial technology job?
Hiring top technical talent can be expensive, especially in a financial hub like London. To keep costs down, banks, hedge funds and trading firms have built out teams in Poland, and their presence in the country is growing.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱.
One of the many banks operating in Poland is Goldman Sachs, which has an office in Warsaw with ~1,100 employees across 15 divisions, more than doubling the space it had in 2017. A real estate insider says the bank is "still expanding" and adding more office space there. Goldman declined to comment.
JPMorgan, meanwhile, has been building out its global operations centre in its Warsaw office, which is thought to be able to house up to 3,000 employees, but only had 1,000 in 2022. Citi, has over 7,000 employees in Warsaw. UBS has more than 5,000 employees in Poland but prefers Wrocław to Warsaw.
Hedge funds have latterly discovered Poland too. Point72 opened a Warsaw office in 2020 and Balyasny in 2024. Quant fund Qube Research is the newest addition; it opened an office in Wrocław this year. Squarepoint Capital is also a newcomer and has hired at least 13 people in the region in the past 4 months, with most of them joining from a Warsaw-based team at GTS, a US electronic market maker.
More hedge fund technology jobs are coming to Poland soon. Speaking off the record, a real estate broker in Warsaw says another major hedge fund is in the process of opening a Warsaw office. He says that Poland has a "critical mass" of talent. "It's probably the only place in Europe now where you can have 500 people in a month on the 30th floor of some class A office space."
Headhunters say it's easy to hire strong and comparatively cheap technology talent in Poland. One suggests that JPMorgan, for example, can afford to upset London technology employees with poor bonuses and return to office edicts because it can easily fill their roles in Warsaw.
It's not all about tech hiring, though. Michał Tyszkiewicz, associate director of commercial real estate firm CBRE Poland, says HR and operations jobs are being moved too. Another real estate insider says "it seems like entire mid/back-office and treasury functions of US multinational companies are moving to Warsaw."
This might be because the talent base in Poland is growing beyond just Polish natives. Tyszkiewicz says that because of Poland's high standard of living, "it is becoming easier and easier to encourage expats to relocate." In Citi's Warsaw office, the bank says it employs more than 90 different nationalities.
Agreeing to move to Poland as a technologist, therefore, might make your job a lot safer, but it comes with drawbacks. A buy-side quant headhunter, also speaking anonymously, says offices in Poland are often "satellite hubs." He says that "firms don’t often do their high-impact work there; core projects are often done in their main hubs." This will make it difficult to convince technologists in areas like London to relocate, as "there is an attraction to working with key decision makers."
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
Photo by Adam Borkowski on Unsplash
