- Citadel is adding Two Sigma's Andrew Janian, the $60 billion quant fund's former chief information officer and data chief, to its tech team.
- Ken Griffin's fund has poached several big names from Wall Street and Silicon Valley for its tech team in the past couple of years, including former Goldman Sachs partner Umesh Subramanian.
- Subramanian, who is now Citadel's chief technology officer, told Business Insider that the goal of his tech team is simple: "Continue to build the best investment research platform on the Street."
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Ken Griffin's Citadel just added another big name to its tech team, poaching Andrew Janian from rival Two Sigma.
Janian, who is expected to begin working at Citadel in the first quarter of 2021, is the latest in a line of big-name hires from Wall Street and Silicon Valley over the last few years that Griffin's firm has added to bolster its tech team.
"The absolute top priority on my list is talent," said Umesh Subramanian, the chief technology officer of $30 billion Citadel, who was a big hire himself for Citadel in 2018. Subramanian was the co-head of Goldman Sachs' technology division and a partner at the global investment bank before joining forces with Griffin.
Since Subramanian joined, the firm has brought on Matthew Bruce and Demian Kosofsky from Instagram and Quantlab, respectively, this year, and poached Morgan Stanley's head of fixed-income starts, Glen Popick, from the bank in 2019. Before Subramanian joined, Paulo Rodela was hired as a managing director from BlackRock in 2017.
Bruce and Kosofsky's hires show the range of talent Citadel and other tech-hungry hedge funds are chasing. Bruce worked for D.E. Shaw for nearly a decade, building out an algorithm focused on options pricing, before joining Facebook's Instagram unit to help run its search function. Kosofsky meanwhile was the chief technology officer for Quantlab after serving in the same role for Teza Technologies, a hedge fund started by a former Citadel Securities employee, Misha Malyshev, for nearly eight years.
Bruce is now a managing director at Citadel while Kosofsky is the head of electronic trading technology.
Janian wore many hats at Two Sigma, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was the chief information officer from 2015 to 2017, and then was put in charge of data from 2017 to when he left in February of this year. He also was in charge of the fund's engineers and was the chief technology officer for the fund's private investments.
At Citadel, Janian will be in charge of "everything post-execution" once he joins after his garden leave, Subramanian said. That will include areas like data and risk management, operations, and treasury functions.
Citadel's tech team, while the firm declined to give an exact figures, numbers hundreds of people now, and the firm is just one of many on Wall Street that are now fighting to get the top talent — both mid-career professionals and students fresh out of school — to choose them.
These teams at hedge funds have a variety of roles, but roles that are at the top of mind for many firms are data ingestion and analysis in the hopes of gaining an edge from the massive amounts of structured and unstructured data that now flows into managers' systems. Last year, recruiters and fund managers told Business Insider that it's one of the rare times where the hedge fund industry wasn't able to pay the most for the talent they wanted in another industry.
Subramanian said the "immediate impact" people can have at Citadel is a big draw as well as the access to "all of the leading tools and resources to make this possible." He also said that finance is no longer a dirty word to this pool of talent, especially firms that have carved reputations as tech-savvy. Citadel, for instance, is proud of the fact that the firm's origin story includes Griffin installing a satellite on the roof of his dorm at Harvard so he could get stock prices faster.
"If we find people who are interested in the intersection of math, computer science and finance, then the pitch is simple and compelling," Subramanian said.
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Here's what it's like to travel during the coronavirus outbreak