So You Want To Be A Citadel Trader: Here Are The Requirements
In the current turbulent times, in which one after another hedge fund is posting miserable performance numbers, gating or simply shutting down, one stalwart remains: Chicago's appropriately named financial megalith Citadel, which year after year posts tremendous returns purely on the back of its retail orderflow frontrunning HFT platform.
No surprise then that thousands of disenchanted traders are eager to move from their current underpaying employer, to Ken Griffen's financial powerhouse. But what skills would one need to be considered for employment and make the cut: fundamental, technical, charting, "blue horseshoe"?
Here is the answer from a just issued job seach posting by Citadel:
Quantitative Trading Systems Developer: Undergraduate, Master’s, PhD and Postdoc (New Grads)
Location: Chicago, IL
Are you a natural programmer who loves to optimize and make systems more efficient? Do you have a sophisticated computational skillset – code optimization, systems architecture and library design? Do you know your core languages like you do your native tongue?
At Citadel, Quantitative Trading System Developers are responsible for designing, building, and optimizing our automated trading platform. Developers work closely with our research, simulation and live trading teams. We are seeking top undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students who are entrepreneurial self-starters and enjoy being in a fast-paced and dynamic environment for exciting opportunities in our automated quantitative trading businesses. This opportunity offers excellent exposure to a quantitative trading career path in one of the world’s leading global financial institutions.
If this is what excites you:
- Developing core trading infrastructure
- Designing low-latency, high-throughput trading systems
- Optimizing massive parallel computing platforms.
And this is what you’ve got:
- Advanced training in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other related fields
- Extensive programming experience with strong object oriented design skills and fluency in C, C++, or Java
- Expertise with algorithms and data structures
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex ideas in a clear, concise fashion
- Ability to thrive in a complex, fast-paced, and highly technical environment
Useful:
- Scripting languages (e.g., Linux shell, Python, Perl)
- Analytical packages (e.g., R, Matlab)
- FPGA development and high performance computing
- NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB)
- Distributed computing using MapReduce
- Multi-threaded programming
- Network programming
This is what Citadel can give you:
- Collaboration with some of the brightest minds in the industry
- Meaningful projects that directly impact global markets
- A culture that values ambition and rewards talent
- World-class training, tools and mentorship
Company Overview:
We’re Citadel, a worldwide leader in finance that uses next-generation technology and alpha-driven strategies to transform the global economy. We tackle some of the toughest problems in the industry by pushing ourselves to be the best again and again. It’s demanding work for the brightest minds, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Here, great ideas can come from anyone. Everyone. You.
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There is ZERO human trade execution at Citadel.
The talented people reverse engineer the fucker then destroy it.
Computer knowledge for The FIX before the CRASH? >>> http://bit.ly/1ihg7qa
Is forget final qualification:
• Cognitive framework free of ethical constraint (e.g. willing to suffocate grandmother with pillow).
Boris - Good to know you're still breathingski. I thought you may have diedski aloneski in you're Dacha.
I thought they threw that guy from England in the pokey for doing just that?
But since he was not a Financial Mafia "Made Man" he was whacked.
And as we all know, Front Running by a silicon based trading unit is perfectly accceptable, carbon based not so much.
Exactly. This is system exploitation, a not unknown concept in the computer science field.
Right ... the machine does the work and the human is the patsy.
Yeah...yeah...yeah...all these requirements are fine...but...can the applicant use a damn telephone?...it appears that it is not a requirement.
As there should not be. What they need the autists for is to generate the trading signals. Once those orders are generated, no more human intervention.
If you're that talented, you should be working at something that improves the world rather than working at feeding Mammon.
our brightest minds are in finance; would-be physicists, mathematicians and programmers.
while we all wait around for the next big thing to move the economy along.
Ill give you a hint: it wont solve climate change, it wont reduce gun violence, it wont fix our crumbling infrastructure and it wont reduce health costs.
It will be an advanced, new "financial product."
"Climate change" is not a problem ....it is a scam.
And you forgot "engineer" in your list of professions because that's the most likely outcome for that set of skills. EE's were one of the most sought after because they study and understand the math of physical systems.
The next big thing is viagra for transgender people. Can someone be gay and transgender?
Yeah, it's called being a faggot.
Oh you!
yes thanks for pointing out engineer. The world weather has been increasingly unfriendly to humans. I dont care if its human made or part of a cycle. When home insurance companies are researching climate and adjusting models for the worse; you should pay attention.
VQ1: I am a scientist / engineer. I am paying attention. You're merely experiencing normal weather / climate and since as more time passes the more likely that the excursion from the mean value mu will break a record. It's that simple.
Typical mistake for people not accustomed to working with stochastic math to make.
vq1- you're part of the problem. Try being part of the solution. Dupes like you are what propogate the fraud, and you really don't have any idea why;
Fortunately for you, your solution has been discussed en masse on these boards, try doing some reading.
so the solution is give billions to Buffet(receives billion in renewable tax credits), Goldman(receives Billion in renewable tax credits), Al Gore(because you need an insider), cronies(because democrats need cronies)...the actual almost useless solutions are pointless....efficiency projects reduce costs and lower more CO2 than any solar or wind project...but of course the CO2 is not the point...THE MONEY IS!
Plus why is the earth temp rising by a couple degrees bad? We have had great weather the last couple years. You tell me how bad things are now and I will you 20 examples of worse whter in the last 10000 years.
Just becasuse the NYT tells you something doesn't make it true
I'm always perplexed by this shit, if you're this capable of writing these algos, why work for a company? Trade for yourself, hell, in futures alone you're looking at banking a few mil a year if your script is that good, and you don't even need HFT.
The infrastructure CapEx is cost-prohibitive for individual traders, even those who "retired" from banking at a young age and with loaded bank accounts...
That's a sure fire way to either get labled a "terrorist" or get suicided.
I have a friend that wrote code for HFT. Much work and helps if you have more than one guy on the project! Capital...that's the answer to your question Why?
No thanks. I rather go broke buying Gold. It's working out OK.
Kill on Sight.
lets see..i hv HL at $6,4,3,2 should i buy more at $1
- Mushroom shaped head
- Large purple vein running from crotch to face
fixed it.
Micheal and Samir need to be hired there so they can mess up mundane details like where a decimal point is placed
No Economics..no Financial knowledge..says it all..its just a game of pennies
economic and financial knowledge would be a detriment to a trader in this market.
Some of our greatest talents producing nothing more than 'market efficiency.'
The market efficiency they're really looking for is some way to can shave a fraction of a nanosecond off their HFT latency times (what come after lasers?), and thus guarantee "trading" profits every day for years to come.
Do you have ethics? Sorry, you're overqualified!
I'd rather get a root canal without pain killers from a dentist in Tijuana.
How again is FPGA programmed chips trading at ms speeds have anything to do with helping investors get to growing and innovative companies? At a fundamental level, the entire reason equity markets exist is to provide investors and businesses a fair marketplace that benefit society as a whole. When will society finally realize that all of these financial "innovations" over the last couple decades are nothing more than a high tech pic pocketing scheme designed to suck off of investors and businesses alike and providing zero benefit to anyone. If nothing else, why would anyone "trade" against this crap?
FPGA would only speed up the algo....the algo would be the same whether run in CPU or FPGA.
but I'm all for getting sucked off. I would want to very carefully choose my broker for that. No like razor burn on thighs.
Low latency through massively parallel operations... 18-lane toll booth verses 2-lane. That's what allows them to jump in line in front of you, buy the trade you wanted FIRST, and then sell it back to you for a few pennies more before you even knew it happened.
I worked for a similar place for two months. Got laid off from one job, and this one was available to me. Sucked pretty bad, and I felt pretty dirty for taking it. I jumped out at the first chance I got.
Talked to a friend that does HFT FPGA code in Chicago (not for Citadel). The FPGA route is faster because, on a full duplex network, it can be sending out bytes for an order as it's reading bytes on a quote simultaneously. This would be well before the CPU where the packet gets CRC'd (at the very end), DMA'd over into memory when your ISR runs, and run through the kernel stacks (more CRCs) on the CPU side, and then got task switched into your trading application -- at this point the battle is long over. FPGA HDLs are Turing complete, so any algorithm that runs on a CPU, can run in an FPGA (it's cost and space constraints here trading off against time constraints).
No need for fancy jargon. More simply said a microprocessor is made out of the same sort of logic gates that are in a microprocessor. The difference is you can configure the FPGA hardware to fit exactly your algo. Then what was many steps can become 1 in FPGA.
It's all about the speed.
i thought the market was designed to move capital from one group to another?
similar to theft, only legal
similar to a casino but with strange and inconsistent odds.
qualifications for a private trader. the ability to figure out what you fucks are doing and ride the wave.
In other words only computing expertise is required, everything else is irrelevant. No wonder the financial system is in trouble.
It is that way by design, not chance, happenstance, accident or coincidence.
FUCK CITADEL AND THE QUANTS BOYS!!!
BYOB? (Bring Your Own Batteries?)
"So you are rocket scientist. How did you end up here?"
Forgot to list rape and screw in the list. So this what folks go to college to do to give each other handjobs?