Key facts
- Citadel and Citadel Securities view investing in young talent as a strategic advantage.
- Campus hires are approximately twice as likely to be identified as top performers.
- Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao and COO Gerald Beeson began their careers at the firms.
- Haris Nair, who started as an engineering intern, now leads a global team.
- Tanya Otsetarova, a former intern, is now a trader and manages interns.
Citadel and Citadel Securities view the recruitment of young talent as a critical strategic advantage, with campus hires being approximately twice as likely to achieve top performance ratings. Several senior leaders within the firms, including CEO Peng Zhao and COO Gerald Beeson, began their careers as interns or recent graduates.
Haris Nair, who interned at Citadel Securities in 2017, now leads a global team of 10 engineers on the research platform team. He advises current interns to focus on projects that offer significant business value and to leverage the firm's non-hierarchical structure to identify and solve problems independently. Nair emphasized that technical brilliance and hard work are expected, and true differentiation comes from initiative and proactive problem-solving.
Tanya Otsetarova, who joined Citadel Securities as an intern in 2022, is now a trader on the semi-systematic options team and manages interns. She identified not asking enough questions during her initial weeks as her biggest mistake, stressing that curiosity and a strong problem-solving ability are more crucial than ever-changing technology. Otsetarova's work on pricing opinions reportedly led to a change in the firm's strategy.