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Finance Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities Trading Firm Is On A Silicon Valley Hiring Binge

This article is more than 4 years old.

Stuart Feldman has played a prominent role in the evolution of the computer industry. He wrote Make, a key software program for Unix operating systems, and developed the first 77 compiler for the Fortran programming language. He went on to become vice president of engineering at Google.

Feldman’s next stop, however, is Wall Street. He has been hired by Citadel Securities, the high-speed electronic trading firm owned by billionaire Ken Griffin, as a senior advisor.

Citadel Securities is the nation’s biggest equity and options market maker, responsible for one in every five stock trades in America and 40% of the retail equity volume. As it battles with billionaire Vincent Viola’s Virtu Financial, Citadel Securities and other market-making firms are loading up on tech talent like never before.

In a big change, half of the 100 or so technologists Citadel Securities has hired in the last two years have come from Silicon Valley or other locations far from Wall Street and traditional securities firms. In total, Citadel Securities has grown to about 700 employees from 400 employees since Peng Zhao became CEO in 2017.

What’s going on here? Wall Street trading has become a tech arms race, increasingly complex, fast and reliant on sophisticated computer-driven techniques. Wall Street has been poaching talent from technology firms for years—James Simons hired the current CEO of his iconic Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, IBM engineer Peter Brown, more than 20 years ago. But the scale of these hires has grown enormously recently.

Citadel Securities is a prime example. Two years ago, Citadel Securities hired as its chief information officer Nawaf Bitar, who was previously the general manager of VMware’s cloud platform business units. Bitar had spent his career in Silicon Valley at firms like Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems.

Other high-level Citadel Securities hires include John Schuster, a former vice president of engineering at Workday, Seth Hettich, a principal engineer from Google, and Cisco engineer Skip Booth.

It’s not easy for Wall Street firms to convince Silicon Valley types to head into finance. In addition to the decision to switch industries and give up the possibility of a winning stock lottery ticket, these computer engineers often have to switch towns. Citadel Securities, for example, is based in Chicago and has big offices in financial centers like New York and London. But there is no Citadel Securities outpost in northern California.

Nevertheless, Wall Street trading firms are increasingly able to entice technologists from non-financial firms with competitive pay packages and the promise of doing work that will be recognized. Citadel Securities is a tiny company compared to Facebook or Apple.

Some of the more high-profile of these hires appear to have worked out. Two Sigma Investments, the giant quantitative hedge fund firm, hired Google’s former vice president of research and special initiatives, Alfred Spector, and he remains Two Sigma’s chief technology officer nearly four years later. Other prominent moves, like Bridgewater’s hiring of former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein as co-CEO and former Microsoft exec Craig Mundie as co-executive chairman, did not last long. But the overall raiding by Wall Street of Silicon Valley talent seems long-lasting.

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