Hiring moves explained by the register
Short, practical reads on senior hiring across short-term trading, quant, optimisation, trading technology and risk, written against the register.
Playbooks, hiring benchmarks and pool maps by market.
One European power market, fourteen labour markets
A European power desk is not hiring from a European talent pool. Prices couple across borders. People mostly do not.
The offer stage is where power desks lose people
Interview processes at trading firms are usually short and usually good. Traders interviewing traders ask sharp questions, decisions come quickly, and the candidate leaves with a clear picture of the book, the risk lines and the people.
Cross-border capacity and the traders who understand it
When a desk decides to trade across a border, the constraint is rarely the risk mandate. It is that flow-based allocation, transmission rights and the machinery of interconnection sit in a narrow band of the market, and the people who genuinely understand them are countable.
Hiring a first quant: sequence matters
A first quant hired before there is data engineering to support them spends a year building pipelines instead of models.
What a power trading CV does not tell you
A CV shows employers and dates. For a power trading hire, that is most of what it shows, and it is not the information the decision needs. Four things are worth establishing before an interview, not during one.
Which universities actually feed European power trading
Engineering schools dominate, and the feeders are strongly national. Those two facts explain most of what a desk needs to know about graduate hiring in this market, and both run against how graduate hiring is usually done.
Fifteen-minute settlement and the shape of an intraday team
Shorter settlement periods do not simply mean more trades. They change what an intraday desk needs from forecasting, from automation and from the people watching the book at four in the afternoon.
Counter-offers on a small desk
On a desk of six, losing one trader is a material event, and everyone involved knows it. The head of desk knows what the book loses. The trader knows what their departure costs.
Battery optimisation is not a trading hire
Asset-backed and battery optimisation roles keep getting scoped as trading roles and then filled with traders who are bored within a year. The desk writes the brief in good faith: it sees intraday markets, prices, a P&L, so it writes a trading job.
How we count a power trading market
Every number on this site comes from a register we build and maintain ourselves. This is the method, including where it is imprecise and why we publish that alongside the figures.
Why most power trading moves are external
64% of role changes on the register are moves to a different employer. 36% are internal promotions or transfers. People also stay in role longer before an internal move than before an external one.
Where to site a European power desk, by role
Country-by-role pool sizes answer a question that headcount totals cannot: not where the most power professionals are, but where the specific people you need are actually concentrated.
The quant you want has probably never worked in energy
87% of the professionals on the register did not start in energy trading.
Negative prices are now a staffing question
Another year of rising negative price hours across European day-ahead markets, and the pattern has stopped being a curiosity.
Senior power trading, quant and optimisation hires across European markets.