What's your job about?
Citadel Securities provides the underlying infrastructure for how financial markets operate. If you, your parents, or your parent’s retirement fund want to make transactions in the market, Citadel Securities has a hand in taking that intention and turning it into purchases or sales on an exchange. As a software engineer on the semi-systematic options desk, my work can span the entirety of the process of trading from providing analytics and smart predictions about what to buy or sell to the systems connected to and allowing us to communicate with the many different exchanges globally. As a software engineer on a trading desk, I work in tandem with traders and quantitative researchers to implement our desired strategies.
What's your background?
I was born and grew up in Canada, living in four different cities before graduating from high school in Vancouver in 2013. I attended the University of Pennsylvania for the following four and a half years before leaving with undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees in computer engineering/science. After hearing about Citadel and Citadel Securities directly through classmates who had interned at the firm, I reached out to our school’s recruiter who set me up with the interview process. After joining, Citadel has taken me now to four different cities spanning North America and Asia, with the latest being Sydney since March of 2021.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes. As a software engineer, the only real common denominator is a reasonable familiarity with programming languages and aspects of how computers operate. As has been evidenced by the massive boom of coding boot camps and learn-to-code programs, with enough grit and determination to learn, anyone with a suitably analytical mindset can apply themselves and become a software engineer.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The thing that I find most interesting about my job is the window it gives me into the inner workings of global financial markets. There are very few places in the world where you can get a full, hands-on understanding of how the world’s stock exchanges and capital markets function and learn from experienced individuals who have been working in this space for their entire careers.
What are the limitations of your job?
Citadel Securities has no explicit career ladder in the traditional tech company sense. It’s common for larger tech firms to have a series of explicit levels and criteria for the promotion. Citadel is much smaller and far more team-based, so the things that a career ladder facilitates (increased technical depth, more ownership over products) don’t naturally come as a result of a yearly promotion process, but is something to be actively managed by each individual developer.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...