Engineering Internship

I enjoyed it so much that I changed my entire education plan to graduate early so I could come back more quickly. By the time I came to Citadel, I had already done internships across a variety of big tech companies and startups. Citadel was my first time really venturing into the finance space. I realized once I got here that the work you do is very similar across any tech company, and what really makes the difference is the culture and the people. Throughout the course of my internship, the people that I met were super engaged, super driven and super intelligent. The culture here is focused on results, and everyone is very committed and accountable to their deadlines and responsibilities. At the same time, they're also very collaborative. I really enjoy that environment because I think it really allows you to excel through your own initiative, but you never feel alone in your journey. One of the great differences between a Citadel internship versus an internship at a big tech company is here you typically work on more than just one project throughout the course of your internship. This is because of the fast-paced nature of the firm, the huge variety of work that needs to get done, and the flexibility you're given to drive how you want to contribute. While I was an intern, I got to work on three different projects. I started off with one about data management, just to get familiar with the system. From there, I worked on two main projects. One was the buildout of a dashboard for the analysts on my team. The other project was a performance optimization problem that was more loosely structured and had a lot of potential to be of really high impact. I was working with analysts who were curious to see visualizations between different market prices and their mathematical combinations. I really enjoyed it because it touched on a lot of different technical challenges that I didn't think I'd ever get to tackle. The end result was a dashboard where the analysts could simply type in what they wanted to see and then it would just clearly display it for them. I worked on both the back-end — like pulling in the data, figuring out a way to understand what it was conveying, and storing it somewhere — and then also building out the dashboard and the front-end component. It was great to work on a full-stack end-to-end product. Even though I had a very rough, V zero version initially, within a few days I was able to have them directly integrate my work so that I could get quick feedback. I rapidly improved the product to a point where it was usable for them both during and after I left the internship. It was very interactive, very back and forth. We would often meet together as a team — myself, the end users, my manager, and people who were more familiar with the firm's technology. They supported me throughout building the projects. We would all scope out what improvements we'd want to see or just generally what the project should look like and bounce ideas back and forth off of each other. I walked out of those meetings with a very clear understanding of what needed to be done, and if I ran into any blockers, I'd know who to reach out to. The analysts also had a better understanding of what they wanted to see out of a UI like this. The other, more experienced technical experts always made themselves very available to me. My mentor and my managers were huge sources of help during the summer.

Citadel is a leading global investment firm built around world-class talent, technology and data. For over a quarter of a century, Citadel's hedge funds have delivered meaningful and measurable results to top-tier investors around the world, including sovereign wealth funds, public institutions, corporate pension plans and private foundations.