Podcast: Gordon Lee on how junior quants can go from newbie to MVP

Prioritising tasks and setting boundaries are key to career progression, says BNY’s head quant

Here’s a piece of advice for aspiring quants: technical talent is not enough. What determines career progress is how your bosses and other colleagues perceive your work.

This handy hint comes from somebody who should know. Gordon Lee is head of markets quants at BNY. He also worked in quantitative analytics at UBS for more than 15 years and has supervised a top-ranked quant finance master’s programme.

Lee says: “Senior leaders, CEOs, heads of markets and heads of business cannot possibly judge every piece of work on individual technical merits. They don’t have the time, and in many cases, the expertise to go through it, so they have to rely on signals,” he says. Because senior leaders rely on signals, juniors should break long projects into visible milestones – milestones show progress and make it possible for stakeholders to understand and support the work.

Lee’s comments come in the latest episode of Quantcast, which discusses how junior quants should navigate a large organisation in a way that is valuable to both the organisation and the quant. The podcast is part of Risk.net’s Tomorrow’s Quants project.

Quantcast – a Risk.net Cutting Edge podcast · Gordon Lee 19/02/2026 Risk Quantcast

 

Once recent graduates have managed to succeed where thousands of others have failed by landing a job in quantitative finance, then the hard work starts. Freshly minted quants must familiarise themselves with internal functions and the balance between them, prioritise some tasks and set boundaries on others. 

The trouble is there isn’t a textbook on how to achieve that. And senior colleagues seldom teach those precious lessons – most of it is absorbed through individual experience. Lee’s own experience has taught him that power in a company doesn’t manifest itself in the obvious places.

Power is not about politics, he says. Instead, power is the “capacity to influence outcomes”. He identifies four sources of power: expertise; relationships and knowledge of who can help on specific tasks; personal authority, which one gets by being known as reliable; and positional authority. Being able to exert that power means being more efficient at getting things done.

Still, even with efficiency, one needs to choose where to direct efforts. Managing stakeholders’ expectations and trade‑offs in a project can be the difference between perceived success and failure. Lee recommends identifying constraints early and framing requests so others can decide whether to accept timelines and limits. Time is finite and must be traded wisely, he says.

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Stay curious, be a team player, speak well – and don’t be big-headed

Interactions with other teams – stereotypically not a quant’s top skill – help the management of expectations. Lee says the credibility and the political capital one builds within the firm are hard-gained currencies and have to be managed: “Credibility is simply the organisation’s belief that your commitments are reliable,” he explains. Credibility is fragile and built slowly. “Political capital is the goodwill and influence one can spend to get things done,” he says. “It is finite and it replenishes very slowly.” In other words, it’s the favours one asks, and one can’t ask too many.

A concept that applies equally to both financial organisations and to any other kind of firm is the necessity of alignment. The lack of alignment on targets or priorities can undermine a project and reflect badly on the person responsible for it. 

One simple negotiating tool Lee offers is the “Yes, if” construction: agree conditionally by saying “Yes, if we deprioritise X”, or “Yes, if the timeline shifts”, which makes constraints explicit without defaulting to a blunt no. 

As the Tomorrow’s Quants project has shown, the ability to make trade‑offs, communicate clearly, protect team capacity and create visible signals will determine who gets responsibility and promotion.

Index: 

00:00 Introduction

03:47 Misconceptions: study versus work; why technical excellence alone is insufficient

06:20 Signals and milestones: making work visible to senior colleagues

07:40 Power comes from expertise, relationships and authority

11:10 Managing stakeholders: trade‑offs, boundaries and prioritisation

13:15 Credibility vs political capital

16:10 Alignment and accountability

24:50 Advice to junior quants: say “Yes, if”

27:00 Bengt Holmström’s influence on this work

To hear the full interview, listen in the player above, or download. Future podcasts in our Quantcast series will be uploaded to Risk.net. You can also visit the main page here to access all tracks, or go to Spotify, Amazon Music or the iTunes store to listen and subscribe.