Sanchit

Trader, Maths and Computer Science

What’s your job about?

Citadel Securities is a market-making firm, which means we constantly quote prices to the market on all the assets we trade. Our primary function is to provide liquidity in the market which allows participants easier access to the markets for when they want to trade.

I’m in the options team and we trade options on both stocks and the indices across different markets in the APAC region. As a trader, I spend most of my day on monitoring the trades we do and how the market performs in general. The main role of a trader is to manage your positions by adjusting pricing parameters based on various factors while also reacting quickly to market changes.

Outside market hours I am usually working on projects that can help improve our pricing model or build smaller tools that could assist us to make better decisions. For example, visualizations to look at while trading, scripts to automate certain actions or research pricing improvements. I also spend time researching the products I trade and keeping on top of any news that may affect the market in general.

What’s your background?

I was born in India but moved to Australia early on and have been in Sydney pretty much my whole life. I graduated high school in 2017 and then studied math and computer science at UNSW from where I graduated in 2021. During university, I worked as a software engineer at a Sydney fintech company for about 2 years and I also did an exchange program at the University of Pennsylvania. I interned at a trading firm in Chicago where I learned more about the trading world.

I joined Citadel Securities as a trader when it just started its operations in Sydney, and really enjoyed the opportunity to participate in a global training program for two months in New York where I met many new joiners from around the world before returning home. Meeting the other new joiners and learning from the American traders was an invaluable experience and the travelling was great too (all while escaping lockdown in Sydney)!

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Definitely! Although most trading firms nowadays look for graduates with STEM backgrounds, the hard skills such as programming or statistical knowledge can be learnt on the job or by yourself. What’s more important is that you have strong problem-solving skills and can pick up concepts quickly. There are a wide range of areas you can focus on as a trader. For example, some traders are really strong at screen trading while others may be more focused on projects and scripting. It all depends on what you enjoy and are good at.

What’s the coolest thing about your job?

The best thing about trading is its fast-paced nature and the constant feedback it provides. I’m an impatient person in general and so the dynamic nature of trading really excites me. When the market is open, you are constantly looking for opportunities and ways to improve your trading. The market also provides instant feedback on any change you make in the form of good or bad trades and from then you’re in charge of utilizing the feedback to keep improving. Busy days can really be an adrenaline rush!

What are the limitations of your job?

Given the fast-paced nature of the job, you’re often forced to make quick decisions with imperfect information on a constant basis. This can sometimes get stressful as things move so quickly and there are often so many unknowns that you have estimated. At the same time, these moments also provide the best learning experience as you encounter more and more market conditions and learn how to react. Dealing with uncertainty is part of the job, but it makes it a whole lot more exciting!

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student…

Enjoy university and make the most of the free time you have. University is the perfect time to explore different opportunities and try new things whether it may be lead to potential jobs or just new hobbies.
Try to get an international experience through either exchange programs or internships. Spending time with people overseas helps you learn a lot faster as you get fresh perspectives. Being brought up and studying in Sydney I wasn’t exposed to different ways of thinking which I was able to get during my exchange program and other overseas trips. Plus you make some great friends!
Reach out and talk to people. If you’re interested in someone’s background or career, reach out for a chat. Most of the time people are more than happy to share their knowledge. By doing this you’ll learn more and you will become more capable of making better decisions.

William

Software Engineer, Chemistry

What's your job about?

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.

What's your background?

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.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

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.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

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.

What are the limitations of your job?

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.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

Get exposure to what you want to do as soon as possible. This will help you work out if you really are interested and if you have the skillset to be successful.
Spend some of your free time working on personal projects.
Explore things outside your major!

Lucas

Software Engineer, Computer Science

What's your job about?

Citadel Securities provides the underlying infrastructure for how financial markets operate. If you, your parents, or your parent’s retirement fund want to make transactions in the market, Citadel Securities has a hand in taking that intention and turning it into purchases or sales on an exchange. As a software engineer on the semi-systematic options desk, my work can span the entirety of the process of trading from providing analytics and smart predictions about what to buy or sell to the systems connected to and allowing us to communicate with the many different exchanges globally. As a software engineer on a trading desk, I work in tandem with traders and quantitative researchers to implement our desired strategies.

What's your background?

I was born and grew up in Canada, living in four different cities before graduating from high school in Vancouver in 2013. I attended the University of Pennsylvania for the following four and a half years before leaving with undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees in computer engineering/science. After hearing about Citadel and Citadel Securities directly through classmates who had interned at the firm, I reached out to our school’s recruiter who set me up with the interview process. After joining, Citadel has taken me now to four different cities spanning North America and Asia, with the latest being Sydney since March of 2021.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Yes. As a software engineer, the only real common denominator is a reasonable familiarity with programming languages and aspects of how computers operate. As has been evidenced by the massive boom of coding boot camps and learn-to-code programs, with enough grit and determination to learn, anyone with a suitably analytical mindset can apply themselves and become a software engineer.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

The thing that I find most interesting about my job is the window it gives me into the inner workings of global financial markets. There are very few places in the world where you can get a full, hands-on understanding of how the world’s stock exchanges and capital markets function and learn from experienced individuals who have been working in this space for their entire careers.

What are the limitations of your job?

Citadel Securities has no explicit career ladder in the traditional tech company sense. It’s common for larger tech firms to have a series of explicit levels and criteria for the promotion. Citadel is much smaller and far more team-based, so the things that a career ladder facilitates (increased technical depth, more ownership over products) don’t naturally come as a result of a yearly promotion process, but is something to be actively managed by each individual developer.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

In making career decisions as a student, take the experiences of your peers seriously. There’s much more you can learn from real-world experiences than from recruiting copy.
Figure out early what a work/life balance looks like for you and jealously guard the separation between those spheres of your student life.
Say yes to all the opportunities you can, professional and otherwise. University is among the most low-consequence times

Bill

Trader, Math & Aerospace Engineering

What's your job about?

I’m an options trader at Citadel Securities, where we take on the role of being ‘Options Market Makers’. This means that we have a contractual obligation to exchanges to continually provide prices at which we will buy and sell securities (options in my case). Unlike a lot of market participants who chose the exact trades they want to do, we specifically don’t get to do that – we always take the opposite side of what others want to do.

My job is primarily about what happens during market hours. When the exchange I trade is open, I’m pretty glued to my trading monitor; adjusting our pricing in order to best manage our position, the trades we are doing, and what our smart pricing inputs are telling us. Out of market hours, my focus is to improve our systems and pricing so that we are as successful as possible during market hours. This ends up meaning I do a lot of talking about pricing and execution improvements with colleagues and teammates and coding up indicators and visualizations in Python.

What's your background?

I grew up in Dubai until I was about 16, at which point I came back to Australia (the Sunshine Coast to be exact) to do my final years of high school and go to University. I was always extremely keen on math and physics throughout school, so I followed these routes into Maths and Engineering at University. I spent quite a few years tutoring throughout university and spent a couple of summers doing professional engineering internships around Australia and in Dubai – but I never really enjoyed the Engineering grad role-type job, as it wasn’t technically challenging enough.

Throughout my degree/upbringing, I never really thought of trading as a job, but happened to stumble across it in my final year of University. I have now worked in this industry a cumulative of 3.5 years and it seems bizarre to me now that I never knew this career opportunity existed, but the decisions I made through my education oddly meant that I was perfectly suited for it.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Yes, the job of a trader is surprisingly broad strokes. I know traders of all different sorts of backgrounds, who mould their own jobs into what they want to get out of it – and what they are good at. My colleagues range from mathematicians and engineers to commerce and accounting professionals to computer scientists to lawyers (all of whom are working as traders now). While maths and statistics knowledge is definitely up there as very handy skills, there’s no set degree for a ‘trader’, so it’s much more based on being logical and working hard.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

I thrive on the constant competition and fast pace of trading, so for me, the best part is the rapid development of pricing and systems. I’m given a large amount of responsibility within my team and choose to pursue a technical and coding-heavy role, so I spend a lot of time designing and implementing ideas which we then push through to production, allowing us to directly experience their benefit (or loss, if things go badly!).

What are the limitations of your job?

If you crave excitement, then trading is a great job for you. A trader’s day is dictated by news events happening in the world, and what other market participants trade against us each day – we never really know what is going to unfold. Trading can be a stressful job, but if you want a technical and competitive job where you get a lot of responsibility, dealing with uncertainty is part of the equation.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

Go out and chat with people in the profession you are interested in. Professionals are generally very keen to talk to people who show an interest in what they do. Message people in the job you want and make it happen.
Apply and interview as much as you can. From the recruiting side, it is obvious who is well-versed in interviews. Don’t only apply for your dream job, use interviewing as a chance to learn. Stack the odds in your favour.
Your job isn’t everything. Find a career where you can still balance your life outside of work, and you have the weekends free to enjoy other things that are important to you.

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