Alex Gerko, the British billionaire trader, is offering to pay students $35,000 a month for internships researching artificial intelligence at his New York office.

Gerko’s XTX Markets, an algorithmic trading firm which uses machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for financial instruments, has published an advertisement for the internship, which lasts for 12 to 14 weeks.

The company said the internship “is designed for highly motivated students in the middle years of their advanced degrees, who are eager to push the boundaries of high-risk, high-reward AI research and rapidly integrate cutting-edge ideas into our advanced strategies”.

• How Alex Gerko rose from poor Moscow suburb to geek royalty

XTX Markets is targeting students pursuing an advanced degree — ideally a PhD — in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, or a related quantitative field, with at least one year remaining before their expected graduation date.

Gerko, 45, grew up in one of Moscow’s poorer suburbs and achieved a PhD in maths from Moscow State University before becoming a trader at Deutsche Bank in 2004, where he worked first in equities and then switched to foreign exchange.

He moved to London with Deutsche in 2006 and joined the British hedge fund GSA Capital three years later, before striking off on his own in 2015 when he set up XTX as a spin-out of GSA.

Gerko is worth about £9 billion, according to this year’s Sunday Times Rich List. He is one of Britain’s biggest taxpayers, and has donated millions of pounds to improve numeracy in the UK. Earlier this year he announced plans to open the country’s first specialist secondary school for exceptionally talented young mathematicians.

The “needs-blind” private school, 1729 Maths School, is due to open in September next year in north London. It will offer bursaries to those who cannot afford the fees.

Successful internship applicants will work at XTY Labs, a division of XTX Markets established in 2024, which is designed as an “academia-like” workspace where researchers will have the opportunity to transform their advanced machine learning research into real-world financial solutions.

Top-performing interns will be actively considered for full-time research roles in either New York or London, the company said.