Working at Citadel

I have been on Blind for several months now and have been surprised about how polarizing some of the reviews of Citadel are. I work on the hedge fund side of the business as an SWE and have been here for several years. No one asked me to write this and it is just me being honest about why I work at Citadel.

1. We are a small company and if you want to do something, just f#$!*$% build it. If you have a vision, drive it forward. Understand the business problem, know your stakeholders, sell your idea, then execute. There are not layers of project managers, product owners, complex management structures preventing you from executing on what you think is right.

2. Everyone hustles. My entire life I have always worked harder than everyone else, it is just in my blood. I have a chip on my shoulder and I always feel like I am trying to prove anyone who has doubted me wrong. I want to work with other people that have that same drive every day. At Citadel everyone that is great has that drive. For people that are considering Citadel, if that doesn't resonate with you, then Citadel probably isn’t the best place. Yes that means I work 50hrs a week, but I wouldn’t want to work somewhere that isn’t the case.

3. Citadel is at the forefront of finance. Whether it is in equities, quant trading, structured products, natural gas, OTCs, deriviatves, etc we are arguably the best shops across asset classes. We manage an obscene amount of post-levered money and literally move markets. Being inside and understanding how we operate and attack financial opportunities is an amazing thing to be a part of. It also provides an invaluable understanding of how the best alternative asset manager is structured. For the rest of my career I can always say “well at Citadel we did it this way..” and that statement alone will add power to my voice if I stay in finance.

4. Autonomy. You aren’t given tasks but given problems. As long as you understand the problem, you have a lot of autonomy to decide how to solve it. This is in part a function of the company being small in head count relative to the number of markets we trade in which necessitates engineers operating independently.

5. The talent level in both technology and investment teams is incredible. We have some of the top quants, ai scientists, meteorologists, geologists, MDs (medical not managing), kube engineers, C++ engineers, react engineers, iOS engineers, GraphQL engineers, R and python core committers, designer of Redshift, gpu engineers, etc. all working at a company with just a couple thousand people.

6. We aren’t cheap, tell Citadel what you need and they will make it happen.

7. And lastly TC. I put it last on this list because for me it is last. However, I have been in the top 0.1% income bracket of my age group every year for the last several years. That is not because Citadel works me to the bone, but because I come to work every day obsessed on adding as much value as I can. In return Citadel recognizes and compensates me for that better than any other company in the world can or would. Period.

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