Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

Not me, that&#x27;s for sure. I interviewed two maths phd&#x27;s years ago, who wanted to get out of academia because they felt themselves above chasing grant money, but then didn&#x27;t want to do anything that wasn&#x27;t their phd topic or related (of which I didn&#x27;t even understand what it was, and they couldn&#x27;t explain, or give examples of what it could be used for).<p>On the other hand, I did hire people who studied maths in programmer-ish roles; meaning: they didn&#x27;t have to be programmers, we&#x27;d teach them, but they did have to apply maths to our concrete problems and translate it into programmed solutions. I don&#x27;t think any of them used particularly advanced maths, or did anything they could get published in maths journals (not that I&#x27;d recognize it if I&#x27;d see it)<p>So, from my perspective, to be employed as a &#x27;mathematician&#x27;, you have to go into academia. Otherwise, you have to apply your math skills in some other field; but you won&#x27;t be called (or probably feel) a &#x27;mathematician&#x27;.<p>(all people with advanced maths degrees I know work as programmers)

I graduated with a BSc in Mathematics in 2008, and didn&#x27;t exactly know what I wanted to do. I just typed the keyword &quot;analyst&quot; into job search engines. It worked pretty well! I ended up getting a job in a field that I didn&#x27;t even know existed when I started (web analytics). It turns out that almost every industry has some sort of data that they can benefit from having someone analyze it, and a Math degree is a pretty good qualification for it.<p>Don&#x27;t worry too much if you don&#x27;t match the exact description of a job posting. I&#x27;ve actually never met all of the job requirements for any of the jobs I&#x27;ve been hired to. Point of fact, most people will look at a Math degree as a degree in &quot;Very Smart&quot; and give you the benefit of the doubt about being able to pick up any specific skills you might be missing. This is doubly-true for niche fields (like web analytics) where there aren&#x27;t specialized degrees, and picking up the skills on the fly is a requirement.<p>I will say, almost any job that you take won&#x27;t look like &quot;doing mathematics&quot; in the sense that you&#x27;re used to from college. That pretty much doesn&#x27;t exist outside of academia, with the possible exception of research labs that require an advanced degree.

I&#x27;m a mechanical engineer with strong minors in applied computational mathematics and scientific computing, and math has been, for me, a super-power. It opens all kinds of thermal, structural analyst jobs. I can optimize all kinds of stuff. I can automate simulations and plot the results in ways that the non-technical can get a good idea of the right direction to go. That all comes from math.<p>Can you hand-code a solver for Maxwells equations or Navier-Stokes (lid-driven cavity flow)? That opens electronics and thermo-fluids. How are you with classic and singular perturbation methods? That gives you signal integrity at Intel - they pay pretty well. Get a few languages under your belt - icky things that are gold plated. MatLab, LabVIEW, Python, SQL, and C. That gives you most of mechanical engineering, lab-based data collection, tons of current &quot;data science&quot;, being able to work with previous content, and making your code go really fast, respectively.<p>Try not looking for jobs on monster, or dice or such. Get friendly with a technical recruiter at Manpower Technical and ask them to get you a few decent contract positions to help you both return some excellent value, and to grow your professional breadth. Make sure some of the positions are business, production, design, and leadership in that order. If you do leadership first without the others, you are wasting yourself.<p>Read a few books on how to negotiate salary. Your earnings at age 25 determine your total lifetime earnings, so if you let yourself get low-balled early, it can cost you a few million in total lifetime earning. You don&#x27;t want that.<p>Once of my heroes is Karl Kempf. Read what he, applied mathematician that he is, has done. He returns a defensible $8 billion per year every year in new value to his company. He is someone to emulate.

I have a PhD in mathematics, and have been working in the public sector (NASA) for a little under 10 years. A mix of interest in numerical linear algebra and software engineering helped me work into a niche in scientific computing and engineering software development.<p>Math is a very, very broad professional interest area. It branches into education, academia, and several areas in several industries around the senior year of an undergraduate program. I&#x27;d recommend undergraduate math majors try and get into co-op or paid internship programs as soon as they feel comfortable with it. But that&#x27;s advice that I&#x27;d also give to ANY student these days.<p>Most technical organizations will hire folks with a mathematics background or entertain the though for a promising applicant. But there are almost no job titles out there called &quot;Mathematician&quot;. That can be confusing to some.

I have a PhD in maths (applied, though most of my undergraduate was pure), and lectured for a couple of years before moving to a bigger city and deciding to break out of the academic hamster wheel.<p>My wife already had a job secured, so I had the opportunity to be a little patient. This really paid off.<p>I considered many of the types of jobs mentioned by others.<p>Analyst &#x2F; tech-consultant jobs didn&#x27;t seem technically interesting enough. Mostly seemed to involved adapting the same framework or analyses to companies&#x27; slightly different requirements.<p>I got through to an on-site interview with an algorithmic trading firm offering huge bucks, but decided I didn&#x27;t like the idea of moving money around to make very rich people even richer. My dad still says I should try and do something like this for just a few years then change to something more fulfilling.<p>I was interested in the betting &#x2F; odds playing type companies and even went to interview with one (rejected). In hindsight I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d have enjoyed it as much as my current job.<p>After a month of my CV being online, I was rung personally by the MD of a smallish company that makes software for public &#x2F; municipal services. He described excitedly the types of optimisation problems he was hoping to solve, and said he&#x27;d been looking to hire the right person to work on it for years. The personal touch and his obvious enthusiasm and energy sold it, and I&#x27;ve now worked there for a year. I&#x27;ve learnt and implemented a lot of algorithms and techniques from a broad range of topics - network routing, discrete optimisation, graph theory, markov chains, plus some bonus stuff like cluster analysis and signal processing. It&#x27;s been more fascinating than all but maybe the first year of my PhD.<p>I guess my advice is just that these types of jobs are out there. I noticed a couple of other comments about radar tracking and remote sensing, both of which sound awesome. If you have the opportunity, hold off until you find something that strikes you as exciting or even unique. If you don&#x27;t have the opportunity, perhaps find something &quot;rote&quot; but keep an eye out.

From my experience, I would offer the generalization that nobody hires mathematicians. Mathematics in society is more of a skill set than a professional title. The most challenging or cutting edge math that could be commonly used is the LINEST() function in Excel. A person who is good at math also has a lot of great skills to offer a company, it is just selling those features and not the calculus.<p>I started out as a math major, then I transitioned to a double major math AND stats because stats is more applicable. I struggled for a year looking for work (also US immigration sucks, even for Canadians) and ended up in a master degree program in Industrial Engineering. I chose engineering specifically for the word &quot;engineering&quot;. I was lucky that I discovered the field of Industrial Engineering at that university otherwise I was headed for a BS in Mechanical.<p>Continuing formal math education will further limit the kind of jobs you can apply, increasing the level of competition. Even the BS in Math left me with the feeling people saw me as over qualified, lacking regular skills.<p>Math is super great by the way, just not the idea of being a &quot;mathematician&quot;. It (unfairly) causes alienation of your true potential.

NSA is the obvious answer if you want to do math - they do math at a lot of levels, from research in algorithmic number theory to programming in mathematically correct exploits. One former NSA employee told me that they retrained him as a programmer.<p>Data Science is possible, but generally seems hard to break in without prior programming experience or a masters or higher - I had problems getting in as a 4 year PhD dropout from a prestigious math program, and ended up teaching myself programming &amp; have carved out a nice career as a software engineer. My math &amp; physics background has proven to be a bonus in my favor when interviewing, and I generally am favorable to people with a math background I encounter in industry&#x2F;interviewing candidates since I have found it fairly uncommon.<p>I would go to on campus career events if possible, and talk with company recruiters about interviewing &amp; general tips. There are potential other options depending on how open you are to them - the options are a lot more open IMO than with most degrees. One thing that might help is to go to Indeed, LinkedIn, etc., and just search for jobs in a particular area - if a particular profession sounds like something that might be feasible&#x2F;palatable for a career or first step, jot down the title, and continue. This doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re committing to anything in particular, but it will help you understand what you are looking for better and better prepare for any future interview sessions where they ask you what got you interested in &lt;insert position&gt;.

I am a mathematics professor (at a non-elite university).<p>If anyone has advice on how I can help our students (at all levels -- undergrad and grad) get jobs in any of these industries, I would be grateful to listen!

The short answer is “everyone”. I’m a mathematician who’s worked in various roles in various sectors. Not one of them actually involved doing any maths, but plenty of them appreciated the kind of mental training studying maths gives you. (There are other routes to this clarity.)<p>So I guess the question is: are you looking for a job where you get to do maths, or are you just worrying about employability?

Data science, data science, data science. The company I&#x27;m involved has some blog posts you might find useful:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dataquest.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-get-a-data-science-job&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dataquest.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-get-a-data-science-job&#x2F;</a><p>Feel free to email me if you want to chat more about data science careers, etc (srini at dataquest.io)

If you find out, let me know! One thing I&#x27;ll caution you about is there&#x27;s sometimes a bit of a disconnect between &quot;doing math&quot; as perceived by someone who studied e.g. CS versus someone who studied math. For some people, doing math means maybe doing some trigonometry or some basic stats; whereas others won&#x27;t be satisfied unless they&#x27;re working on algebraic k-theory or something similarly next level. For people in the former category, there are certainly jobs available with just a bachelors degree and ideally some programming skills, whereas for the latter, you&#x27;ll almost certainly want a PhD (and even then you may not get to use that knowledge outside of academia, depending on your area of study.) You&#x27;ll want to find out where you are on that spectrum, and how you feel about grad school &#x2F; work life balance &#x2F; etc.<p>Personally, I got a bachelors in math and ended up working as a software developer. There&#x27;s enough overlap in the sort of thinking required that makes it reasonably enjoyable. I do wish I had more opportunities to use math in my job though!

If you see mathematics as a highly transferrable and broad intellectual skill (rather than a narrow profession), <i>everybody</i> hires mathematicians.<p>In software and computer science especially, mathematicians are likely to find a compelling place to apply and develop those skills.<p>I&#x27;ve often thought the skillset for mathematics and software engineer are isomorphic. Interestingly, there&#x27;s a mathematical theorem showing that to be true for functional programming (Google Curry-Howard correspondence).<p>My observation and experience is that good mathematicians make great software developers. I believe Ryan Dahl dropped out of a PhD program for algebraic topology and made node.js as one of his first open source contributions.

A math degree could be very useful in the remote sensing industry (this has both commercial and military uses). Processing radar and lidar data, construction of 3d representations from imagery and video sources. This has applications in agriculture, mining, medical, intelligence gathering, military intelligence, etc.<p>In my experiences with companies doing this work it was a healthy mix of CS, math, and physics personnel. The ones working for DoD largely preferred people with PhDs and masters degrees as they bill the government more for those people&#x27;s time, but they would also provide a lot of financial aid (often 100%) for you to pursue graduate degrees for the same reason.

If you want something that is mostly &quot;doing mathematics&quot;, i.e. thinking about Galois groups, differential geometry, or the Riemann hypothesis, that is pretty tough. Many jobs have interesting mathematical content, but to get them you will probably need to convince the prospective employer that you can handle the non-mathematical content, which likely means writing non-trivial computer programs. The one exception that I can think of might be entry-level actuarial positions.<p>At this point, a lot of people decide to get a masters degree in operations research, statistics, or computer science. But don&#x27;t completely give up and get an MBA. :-)

I did the same thing, and ended up working for an early-stage biotech company doing some combination of hardware design, signal processing, machine learning, and experiment design. For better or worse, people generally seem to think a math degree implies &quot;smart&quot; and tend to be willing to overlook a lack of any specific skills...

The NSA. (Really. Some of the largest employers of mathematicians.)

My company which is the largest sports betting company in the Balkans is having a team made of only mathematicians. They do work related to statistics and calculations for ods and game mechanics.

Off topic: one of my secret regrets in life is that I am not smart enough to be a mathematician. I watch the popular channels, I read about the new discoveries, I drunkenly explain some of the fancy concepts to my friends after the fourth beer. I wish I could understand higher mathematics.

Machine learning is actually quite math-lite in comparison to &quot;math&quot; like PhD math. Most masters&#x2F;PhD math stuff just isn&#x27;t required or used in the discipline at all. You can get away with undergraduate analysis for pretty much all of it. But it builds off of undergraduate math. So in that sense, you&#x27;re not really looking for a position for &quot;mathematicans&quot;, rather a position for &quot;data scientist&quot; or &quot;quantitative ...&quot;, where if you take a field and stick quantitative in front there&#x27;s a subfield for it. If you search those terms you&#x27;ll likely find things more in line with what you&#x27;re looking for.<p>As for places to look, there&#x27;s lots of stuff going on in the web and general computing sectors which are now making use of machine learning tools and hiring teams of data scientists. There&#x27;s also quantitative biology (pharmacology), climate science, etc. disciplines, but many of them want applicants who have a PhD.<p>If things don&#x27;t seem &quot;mathy&quot; enough, it&#x27;s because a lot of the true math jobs and research requires a graduate degree in a math-related field. Doesn&#x27;t need to be a Math&#x2F;Applied Math PhD, but even CS, Physics, Climatology, Systems Biology, etc. programs set you up for a math-based career. Without trying to be demeaning, math is a very vertical discipline and the issue is that undergraduate math is really just the basic competences and most of the interesting stuff comes after, which is why many things require a lot more than a BS.

Personally, I specialized in cryptography, did a few years of research in security, and now work in security. Note that I always liked programming (in fact I kind of chose math over eng pretty much randomly). To your point, I don&#x27;t do a lot of math on a daily basis -- I see it more like painting&#x2F;singing, you keep it as a passion, you don&#x27;t do just that for living.

Domain experts that can code are among the highest paid people in several industries. So, if you don&#x27;t know how to code, it would likely be a valuable skill to learn. Python is probably sufficient for many industries, though some of the performance-minded fields want C++ and even Fortran(!).<p>Lots of scientific computing requires a lot of math and is used in many industries (a company I did contract work for in the past had contracts doing fluid dynamics for P&amp;G, geological analysis for ConocoPhillips, and something for NASA...all using the same set of technical tools, specifically Python, NumPy&#x2F;SciPy, and some C++&#x2F;Fortran backend stuff for performance; the company was founded by a math PhD and they employed multiple math PhDs and at least half of the people they employed had some sort of significant math background).<p>So, if I were in your shoes, I&#x27;d learn SciPy&#x2F;NumPy, and start following the related communities for job postings. There&#x27;s a lot of demand and a lot of good-paying positions surrounding those communities.<p>Data science works with math, too, but not often at the advanced levels it sounds like you might be looking for. AI&#x2F;ML is also somewhat mathy, but not as much as one might think (though I get the feeling there&#x27;s room for more mathy approaches to problems that are currently very brute-forcey, but my understanding of math and of AI&#x2F;ML is low enough to where that gut feeling could very well be wrong).<p>Finally, digital signal processing is an area with significant reliance on math (though pretty specific sub-genres of math). I&#x27;ve recently started taking a couple of math MOOCs to refresh my memory of higher maths (and to learn it for the first time in some cases) so I can understand DSP algorithms for audio and music a little better. DSP has many applications in mobile devices, voice recognition, music and audio and video, etc.

If you&#x27;re interested in biomedical sciences and curing diseases, then a career in bioinformatics&#x2F;computational biology might be worth considering: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bioinformaticscareerguide.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;career-guide.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bioinformaticscareerguide.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;career-guide.html</a>

I used to manage a data science team for an ad-tech company. Applied modeling problems come up a lot in advertising - how to model an event as a probability distribution, how to use several of these probability distributions to solve optimization problems in order to get most benefit given a fixed budget, and so on. During my time managing that team, we had a few former PhD&#x27;s (both graduated and all-but-dissertation).<p>Since you asked, I currently work at Amazon, and we&#x27;re hiring PhD&#x27;s as applied scientists: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.jobs&#x2F;en&#x2F;search?base_query=phd+mathematics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.jobs&#x2F;en&#x2F;search?base_query=phd+mathematics</a>

HPC companies hire many mathematicians. I work with several PhDs in applied mathematics.<p>Another area is finance, as you mentioned. I interviewed at several hedge funds and investment banks after my undergraduate degree (in physics and mathematics).<p>Of course, it&#x27;s not hard to go into CS for a masters or PhD which opens up many other options as well. This was more what I did.<p>Almost all these positions require you to be capable of both whiteboard work, along with programming. So be sure you can develop software.

When statisticians rebranded themselves as data scientists a few years ago they got themselves a pretty big average salary bump for their trouble.

I worked at a company that made CAD&#x2F;CAM software and had to make extensive use of calculus &#x2F; linear algebra &#x2F; computational geometry. Depending on what kind of math you like doing &#x2F; using, that might be an industry worth looking into. Though it was a software development job, so I&#x27;m not sure if that aligns with your interests either.

My colleague has a 1st class honours degree in Maths from Cambridge university, he is both a mathematician and a software engineer. We work on radar tracking algorithms, for civil and military aircraft in the UK. Developing and&#x2F;or understanding such algorithms needs highly skilled people who understand Maths; I consider them to be Mathematicians.

Professional societies like SIAM have listings, which you can view to get a rough idea: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.siam.org&#x2F;careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.siam.org&#x2F;careers&#x2F;</a> . Most of these are academic, but not all. (I think, or at least hope, there&#x27;s a way to filter&#x2F;sort.) Most of them may be targeted at PhDs, but again not all.<p>I&#x27;m an academic myself, and a significant fraction of our recent PhD grads have gotten positions in data science, and at least one is now at a pharmaceutical company working on mathematical modeling. The jobs are out there. The tricky thing is that people don&#x27;t generally advertise for mathematicians, even though a good mathematician may fit the job well.

Insurance companies. Look into the actuarial profession.

I&#x27;ve co-founded three companies (www.futurescaper.com, www.podaris.com, and www.imatest.com, to a much lesser extent), all of which have employed mathematicians on at least a part-time basis. If you&#x27;re doing fancy parametric constraints-based modelling systems, analysis of n-dimensional causal graphs, or analysis of digital imaging systems, then a robust mathematics background can really help. Non of our hires have been been <i>pure</i> mathematicians, inasmuch as we&#x27;ve needed them to also be able to code. But I can easily imagine that larger companies pursuing similar domains <i>ought</i> to see the value in having purer mathematicians on their payroll.

One piece of advice I would give you is to think about where your particular area of focus in math overlaps with CS, how you could apply that towards a real world problem &#x2F; situation and how you could tailor your education towards that goal. People in Math &#x2F; ML &#x2F; Stats with the chops to translate their research into production quality code and systems are in huge demand. PS, we are hiring data scientists at Wheelhouse! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boards.greenhouse.io&#x2F;wheelhouse&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;811845" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boards.greenhouse.io&#x2F;wheelhouse&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;811845</a>

You&#x27;re doing it the wrong way round. Who needs mathematicians? What can it be used for? Find the appropriate people on forums, github or whatever and talk to them about it. Not HR, people who are involved in whatever you want to be involved in.<p>Maybe get to know this too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;pycharm&#x2F;features&#x2F;scientific_tools.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;pycharm&#x2F;features&#x2F;scientific_tools....</a>

The NSA is allegedly the biggest employer of mathematicians in the US, and possibly the world -- which is troubling, considering how ethically questionable their work is.

I know several top-level mathematicians (International Math Olympiad medalists) and not all of them are working as Quants. Some of them compose music, some of them are working as machine learning experts, VC funds, etc. They may be slight outliers but it&#x27;s possible to do whatever you want as long as you posses the intellect and drive. I think Mathematics definitely help with developing your logic skills that are applicable to anything.

My friend who did a math BS + partial masters from a large state agricultural university got a job at a company similar to this <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tricore.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tricore.org&#x2F;</a>. understanding statistics and working with VBA in excel were important, moreso than programming which looked like the easy part. There were a couple other people with PHD in math who also work there.

Data engineering and data science teams at Avant are biased towards hiring pure math graduates. I think it&#x27;s because training in mathematics necessarily teaches you to jump up and down between different layers of abstraction which makes motivated mathematicians very quick and effective learners.<p>If you don&#x27;t mind relocating to Chicago drop me a line at kirill.sevastyanenko (at) avant

I did a BSc in math&#x2F;econ, then MSc in math. Went into consulting work, mostly in security. Now work in crypto for a tech company.

We just made a maths-heavy hire where a majority of work is expected to be machine learning, linear algebra, forecasting, data analysis, etc. We design food preparation and retail robots and supporting logistics and automation systems.<p>Previously I tried to hire a maths PhD out of academia but the guy was all talk and no action. He&#x27;s now working for a hedge fund.

I recently got a PhD in pure mathematics, and also recently started my job as a junior developer in a large consultant firm in Norway. I only knew basic Java and Python, but coming from mathematics, I find learning formal stuff quite easy.<p>I&#x27;ve been working now for 4 months, and I really enjoy it. I&#x27;m still learning something every day.

I&#x27;m at NIPS (#NIPS2017) right now and both computer science and industry need more people with strong math backgrounds. Advice: learn how to program and you&#x27;ll never be in need of interesting-enough mathematics<p>Edit:<p>Learn functional programming. It feels like math to a math person. Imperative programming feels very foreign (e.g., standard python).

Formal specifications and verification, proof assistants; program analysis and synthesis; cryptography from protocols to at-rest; compilers and performance analysis, etc.<p>I view maths as a power-augmenting skill set, like programming (which is a kind of applied maths). It lets you think big thoughts.

Look up &quot;data science&quot; positions wide range of applications and needs depending on the company

What are your interests? What kind of work&#x2F;industry are you looking for?<p>I graduated MMath in 2012 and have just completed my 5th year as a Software Engineer at Bloomberg. I had a lot of programming experience, which helped. We have a specialist graduate program for non-CS grads.

Quant desks in hedge funds and prop trading companies - like Jane Street, SIG and the like.<p>In most of those places, &#x27;maths&#x27; will involve a lot of data science and machine learning, plus a fair bit of programming, however PhD degree is quite often a hard requirement.<p>(Source: am a quant)

Please also look at genomics&#x2F;bioinformatics. Lot&#x27;s of mathematics + software involved.

US federal government is looking for a few: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usajobs.gov&#x2F;GetJob&#x2F;ViewDetails&#x2F;478727900" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usajobs.gov&#x2F;GetJob&#x2F;ViewDetails&#x2F;478727900</a>

GCHQ &#x2F; CESG &#x2F; whatever the equivalent is in your country.<p>See also arms length organisations, such as Heilbronn Institute. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heilbronn.ac.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heilbronn.ac.uk&#x2F;</a>

We have a large number of MS&#x2F;PhD level Math folks in my Data Science group.

Actuarial work is quite maths-y and grad schemes typically want maths grads as they&#x27;ll have the requisite grounding to do the actual work. It is not fully finance but it is obviously money&#x2F;risk related.

Totally anecdotally, I&#x27;ve had friends with undergraduate degrees in Math go straight into consulting and software engineering out of college with limited work experience.

Neptune technology group. Water meter company since 1892. They started making ultrasonic meters a few years back and are looking for an applied mathematician.

Mathematicians can be excellent programmers, especially in machine learning and statistical fields. I am a programmer and would love to be a mathematician.

I graduated with an MS in Applied Mathematics and ended up working as a data scientist for 4 years until moving on to more interesting stuff.

The NSA and specialized consulting firms in the Washington, DC area ( Reston )

Aranz Geo&#x2F; Seequent does providing you can code to

Who hires physicists? Asking for a friend.

Have you considered the NSA or CCR?

Pretty much anything. Any consultancy would probably hire you as an analyst for example if you social skills are ok.

Casino game publishers in Vegas

banks, small armies of them...

NSA is great for mathematicians, but competition is tough. The best way to get in as a co-op early in your college years, since it takes a year to get a clearance.

Spend a couple of months studying deep learning and python and you will get a very well paid job.