(Below is a rant but might be a useful read to a lot of freshers/new folks who can get influenced by FAANG, DSA/CP influencers and others on LinkedIn. This is particularly in response to the perception of people regards to Financial Companies.)

A lot of people have a misconception that SDEs are second class citizens in "Financial Company". First of all, putting everything under the bracket of "Financial Company" is not right. Axis Bank and Jane Street are financial services companies but the way they operate and the work culture, tech, everything is way different.

In fact, even Goldman Sachs, D. E. Shaw and Jane Street are all in different leagues. The following is the increasing order of work, compensation and tech dependency IMO.

Goldman Sachs, JPMC - Investment Banks - Decent tech, but not the best. The reason being they are in general banks with some exposure to trading. They do not compete a lot at technological level. Strategy matters more to them vs how quickly or the scale at which they execute the strategy technically.

D.E. Shaw, Citadel Securities, Two Sigma - Hedge Funds. Usually very secretive about everything, hence people do not hear a lot about them. They do not care a lot about UX, design, customers etc. However, they care a lot (I mean a lot) about the tech. They have internally written highly scalable order execution engines which execute millions of order per second, low latency infrastructures, analytics engines which execute regression, etc for 10000 of stocks, etc. None of these is possible without tech, so they place tech just beside their traders. The more sophisticated the firm is, the more advanced and robust their tech should be. For this they hire the best out there. They do not hire a lot of people, and keep themselves exclusivists.

Jane Street, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading - Private Equity. They are even much more secretive in general. Jump Trading has at least created a decent website right now, but earlier their website had just the text Jump Trading with two options at the bottom, "Careers" and "Contact Us". That is it. They just don't care to market themselves or impress the world. However, these companies pay top tier salaries and in India they would only go to IITB, IITD, IITM for day 0. For eg. Jane Street was paying 13L per month, (yes per month) for their internship program in SDE. Google came on day 1. Jane Street was the dream company of all the top folks out there. (https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=jane%20street&sid=amX). In order to check their tech work and how they operate try going through a few tech talks by Jane street. The teams are small and the work is very challenging and impacful.

The issue is many people have not heard about these companies and always assume FAANG >>> all other companies. However, if you see the talent pool at these companies, the people they recruit, the compensation they pay and the tech culture at these companies, it will help you think clearly.

Edit: I think it makes sense to add some context why I wrote the above rant. One of my acquaintances asked me why do the "Financial Services" ask so much of CS fundamentals even though they do not operate at scale and that their tech quality is far below FAANG's tech quality. I think a lot of people share the same perception, hence sharing my views.
I do not intend to demean FAANG or any tech company out there by this post. FAANG is great. This post is more about how people should broaden their horizon.