Candidate FAQs: Engineering

What are the skills and traits of successful engineers?

Confidence and a commercial mindset
Being able to operate confidently in a fast, dynamic environment is necessary. You should feel comfortable making decisions, assessing risk and trusting your intuition as you design systems.

Quick learning and comfort with ambiguity
You must possess the ability to learn quickly and be comfortable operating in unfamiliar situations. You are building solutions for problems we identify in real time. There is often no playbook, so constant learning and adaptability are key. We want candidates who are excited by the fact that it is often those moments with the least definition that yield the most innovation.

Problem solving
You will face challenging, exciting and sometimes ambiguous problems. Being a motivated problem solver is critical. You’ll be able to tap into the best tools and resources available, including bright teammates who want to see you succeed.

We encourage initiative. People who take responsibility and accountability for projects grow the fastest.

Technical proficiency
Excellence is a baseline—you need to be an amazing engineer. But you don’t need to be an expert in many specific program languages on Day One; we’ll teach you. We want talented engineers who want to learn, master new skills and continue to raise the bar together.

What makes engineering so critical to our work?

Driving the Business Forward
Practically speaking, we sit with the business to understand their needs and work with quant researchers to spec out systematic and semi-systematic trading algorithms. We then build out these trading engines from the ground up.

Our work equips teams within the organization and helps Citadel Securities meet the needs of clients and counterparties like retail brokers and banks. It’s exciting to be part of a team that drives benefits for retail and institutional investors around the world and global financial markets overall.

What types of problems do our engineers solve?

Engineers wear a variety of hats depending on their team or specialty. All software engineers play important roles in driving the firm’s performance.

Our process is simple: we start with a goal and build technology to achieve it. For example:

• Building products that connect to exchanges to support a variety of trading approaches
• Developing systems to help to consume and assign meaning to market data in real time
• Creating tools that help prepare for market events and model the impact of specific scenarios
• Building trading engines that connect buyers and sellers, allowing them to send orders and receive executions. This keeps markets free flowing for all participants.

Our work drives proactive, big ideas that have an outsized impact. The opportunity to convert thoughtful ideas from theory into real-world applications is both challenging and exciting.

For example, we recently proposed a framework that could turn our research models into high-performance, production-ready components. The management team empowered us to deliver on this solution in a fully dedicated fashion for a year, delivering significant impact to the firm’s bottom line.