Why Citadel Securities is improving its tech stack
One of the reasons many reasons tech staff chose to work for electronic trading firms like Citadel Securities or Jane Street over banking is that they're leaner organizations with less cumbersome tech stacks.
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However, much like banks, Business Insider says Citadel Securities also has more applications and technologies in use than it would like. In 2023, however, the firm decided to do something about it.
Citadel Securities' technology redesign is aiming for simplicity. The firm's technology COO, Jeff Maurone, told Business Insider it's "re-architecting systems in a standard global way." By reducing operational complexity, the firm is aiming to make its platform more robust, allowing it to trade and enter new markets at a reduced cost. Citadel Securities plans to have a seamless, integrated system that willpower the firm's operations for at least ten years.
The transformation is a far quicker one than the banking industry is likely to see. Citi, for example, has 6.5k legacy application. Two years in, the bank is only 13% of the way through retiring them. Citadel Securities expects to be finished next year.
Development teams at Citadel Securities have historically prioritized a quick turnaround; in its block ETF business, developers would produce Beta versions of key infrastructure components in a single weekend.
Business Insider says Citadel Securities the transformation is beeing overseen by a team of product managers and divisional COOs. Previous product managers have come from Morgan Stanley and Facebook, but one of the most recent hires, Connor Lyons, joined in July after seven years at Tesla and working on its vehicle Autopilot.
The rebuild appears to be a long time coming for Citadel Securities' engineers. Some anonymous reviews on forum Blind that date to the period before the revamp called Citadel Securities' technology "pretty messy" and even "horrible." Reviewers said the firm had "many legacy systems and issues."
Things are looking up, however. Some reviews in 2024 say "infrastructure keeps improving," with reviews highlighting its "well-designed" QA framework and component ecosystem as highlights. The deep learning and tooling infrastructures are still problematic according to the reviews, which are not validated and anonymous.
Citadel Securities previous tech stack was still able to facilitate consistent returns for the firm. According to Bloomberg, it has generated over $1bn in revenue for 14 consecutive quarters.
Citadel Securities declined to comment.
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