Citadel Securities

What's your job about?

Citadel Securities is a global market maker and I am a software engineer that works with the options market-making desk to build and maintain components that form part of a real-time trading system.

I work directly with traders and quantitative researchers on projects designed for new trading strategies or business plans. I also work with them to upgrade and improve existing technology. There is a large variety of work that I’m involved in, including capturing data for later analysis, serving user interfaces, managing user parameters, trade reporting and reconciliation etc. It really is a ‘full stack’ role and I get to touch all aspects of our business. A general day for me might be supporting the start of day processes and managing a new release or upgrade of a component as the market opens. Once trading has begun there is then time for project work.

What's your background?

I grew up in a small post-industrial town in the north of England. I ended up studying Chemistry at Oxford because I enjoyed it at school. I started exploring programming in my spare time in colleague and spent most of my time while doing my master’s degree writing software that would model the NMR shifts for medium to large-sized molecules. I enjoyed this so much I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer. I did some internships and eventually found myself at Citadel Securities London to work with the options desk. I’ve been with the firm for 5 years now and worked in London, Hong Kong before relocating to Australia in 2020.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

I am the breathing example of someone without a computer science and engineering background doing my job! There are so many good resources online now (that I wished I had!) that help you learn all the core computer science and engineering fundamentals. The main issue is getting your foot in the door so it’s important to get as much experience as you can with your own personal projects and via internships.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

Getting to work on the full stack of a real-time trading system! There are so many different pieces and different aspects to explore, there is a wide range of things you can work on.

What are the limitations of your job?

The software we work with can sometimes be quite complicated – this means that you do have to spend a lot of your time thinking about and reading other people’s code to make what might seem to be a small change. Testing real-time software can often be very hard too and is a skill in and of itself! There is also quite a lot of responsibility – bugs and errors in code can cause trading problems that can not only just lose the firm money but also potentially cause compliance issues.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

• Get exposure to what you want to do as soon as possible. This will help you work out if you really are interested and if you have the skillset to be successful.
• Spend some of your free time working on personal projects.
• Explore things outside your major!

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...

• In making career decisions as a student, take the experiences of your peers seriously. There’s much more you can learn from real-world experiences than from recruiting copy.
• Figure out early what a work/life balance looks like for you and jealously guard the separation between those spheres of your student life.
• Say yes to all the opportunities you can, professional and otherwise. University is among the most low-consequence times

What's your job about?

I’m an options trader at Citadel Securities, where we take on the role of being ‘Options Market Makers’. This means that we have a contractual obligation to exchanges to continually provide prices at which we will buy and sell securities (options in my case). Unlike a lot of market participants who chose the exact trades they want to do, we specifically don’t get to do that – we always take the opposite side of what others want to do.

My job is primarily about what happens during market hours. When the exchange I trade is open, I’m pretty glued to my trading monitor; adjusting our pricing in order to best manage our position, the trades we are doing, and what our smart pricing inputs are telling us. Out of market hours, my focus is to improve our systems and pricing so that we are as successful as possible during market hours. This ends up meaning I do a lot of talking about pricing and execution improvements with colleagues and teammates and coding up indicators and visualizations in Python.

What's your background?

I grew up in Dubai until I was about 16, at which point I came back to Australia (the Sunshine Coast to be exact) to do my final years of high school and go to University. I was always extremely keen on math and physics throughout school, so I followed these routes into Maths and Engineering at University. I spent quite a few years tutoring throughout university and spent a couple of summers doing professional engineering internships around Australia and in Dubai – but I never really enjoyed the Engineering grad role-type job, as it wasn’t technically challenging enough.

Throughout my degree/upbringing, I never really thought of trading as a job, but happened to stumble across it in my final year of University. I have now worked in this industry a cumulative of 3.5 years and it seems bizarre to me now that I never knew this career opportunity existed, but the decisions I made through my education oddly meant that I was perfectly suited for it.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Yes, the job of a trader is surprisingly broad strokes. I know traders of all different sorts of backgrounds, who mould their own jobs into what they want to get out of it – and what they are good at. My colleagues range from mathematicians and engineers to commerce and accounting professionals to computer scientists to lawyers (all of whom are working as traders now). While maths and statistics knowledge is definitely up there as very handy skills, there’s no set degree for a ‘trader’, so it’s much more based on being logical and working hard.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

I thrive on the constant competition and fast pace of trading, so for me, the best part is the rapid development of pricing and systems. I’m given a large amount of responsibility within my team and choose to pursue a technical and coding-heavy role, so I spend a lot of time designing and implementing ideas which we then push through to production, allowing us to directly experience their benefit (or loss, if things go badly!).

What are the limitations of your job?

If you crave excitement, then trading is a great job for you. A trader’s day is dictated by news events happening in the world, and what other market participants trade against us each day – we never really know what is going to unfold. Trading can be a stressful job, but if you want a technical and competitive job where you get a lot of responsibility, dealing with uncertainty is part of the equation.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

• Go out and chat with people in the profession you are interested in. Professionals are generally very keen to talk to people who show an interest in what they do. Message people in the job you want and make it happen.
• Apply and interview as much as you can. From the recruiting side, it is obvious who is well-versed in interviews. Don’t only apply for your dream job, use interviewing as a chance to learn. Stack the odds in your favour.
• Your job isn’t everything. Find a career where you can still balance your life outside of work, and you have the weekends free to enjoy other things that are important to you.