Realistically, what do quants do as their day-to-day job?

[PolyByte]

To get straight to the crux of my question, would a quant at a top- or mid-tier firm be doing pure math/stats? Or would they realistically need to do a lot of the data collection/pipelines as well?

For some background, I'm a CS major currently doing a PhD in quantitative portfolio management and I'm just finishing up an internship in a very young small-cap financial services firm. They've offered me a full-time position to setup and operate a data and analytics division, and I'd need to drop my PhD to part time.

I love the people, and love the idea of building up my own team from scratch rather than just being a cog in the machine of an existing large company. However, the job isn't really what I want to be doing long term. I am afraid that I'll be spending so much time doing the 'data engineering' side of things that I'll loose my competitive edge with the stats. I want to be building quantitative investment strategies, not business intelligence pipelines/dashboards.

Would it make sense to seek other opportunities/focus on the PhD so I can be competitive with stats? Or would every quant role have a data engineering component and I'd just be crazy to give up the opportunity to run a data division at such a young age?

 

[LucasKoc]

would every quant role have a data engineering component

I was wondering about the same thing in this post this post

 

[Andy Nguyen]

We have a series of "A day in the life of" discussions where the authors share their daily job routine. It would provide insight into the roles you are interested in.
You can find those by searching for the phrase "a day in the life of" and search title only.