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.
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.
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.
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.
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.