Hedge fund Brevan Howard parted company with 7 top technologists

Hedge fund Brevan Howard isn't having the best year. Although its $12bn Alpha Strategies fund was up 6% in the year to August, Financial News reported this week that the equivalently sized Brevan Howard Master Fund was down 1.4% At the start of August, Rokos Capital Management - run by former Brevan Howard trader Chris Rokos, was up 14%. Costs at Brevan have been squeezed: after cutting underperforming portfolio managers in April 2024, Brevan cut underperformers again in January. 

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Portfolio managers are not the only people disappearing. In the past 18 months, Brevan Howard has also parted company with some of its top technology staff.

The fund declined to comment for this article, but at least seven of its 200+ technology staff have left, with some thought to have gone in the past few weeks. Seven out of 200 people is not statistically significant, but the departures have included some of the most senior technologists from Brevan Howard's platform.

They include: John Loendorf, the New York based head of infrastructure for the systematic business; Catherine Garrod, the London-based chief information security officer; Seth Osher, the head of front office macro trading technology; Jon Freedman, the head of back and middle office technology; Robert Johnson Perkins, the self-described head of front office technology; Subhek Garg, the former head of front office quants and technology; and Kevin Gage, the former CTO. 

Loendorf, Garrod and Osher are thought to have left recently; the others on the list are understood to have left last year. Gage says on LinkedIn that he remained at Brevan Howard as a partner until April 2025. After joining from Mizuho in late 2022, Gage's stint as Brevan's CTO lasted just over a year and a half. 

The reasons for the exits are unclear. In late 2024, though, Brevan hired Mike Sanders from JPMorgan as a new CTO. Sanders has set about stamping his own imprint on the technology function: he's opening an office in India and has hired Joey Allock, a former MD who says on LinkedIn that he ran engineering for the investment banking rather than the trading team at Goldman Sachs.

Brevan Howard insiders say the past few years have been a time of change in the technology function. Under Gage, it's understood that Brevan's in-house technology function expanded dramatically to 200 people in a period of around 12 months. Gage then left the CTO role and in 2024, the combined total layoffs for core business tech and systematic technology functions at Brevan Howard were 20%.

After Gage's departure, it's thought that the technology function was initially run by a combination of Freedman, Loendorf, Garrod and Osher, along with Chris Willis, the head of quantitative analysis who has worked there since 2012.  Together, they reported directly to Brevan CEO Aron Landy. All but Willis have now left the firm. 

There have been comings and goings in Brevan's technology team in the past. Gurpreet Singh, for example, joined in April 2021 as head of the systematic business and then left again 16 months later. Singh is now at Millennium. 

Technologists aren't the only people to have left the firm recently. It's understood that Eric Wang, a systematic portfolio manager, has left the firm in Abu Dhabi.

Brevan recently secured an investment of $2bn from Abu Dhabi-based Lunate and is expected to hire. Reviewers on Glassdoor have given the firm 2.9 stars as an employer. However, only 81 people have left reviews and the reviews may be neither representative nor validated. One Brevan insider told us that working there is equivalent to working for most major hedge funds.  

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