Last January, Ken Griffin‘s hedge fund Citadel hired JPMorgan’s head of UI Neil Slinger to lead commodities core engineering. We’ve noted Slinger’s propensity to use JPMorgan as a source of UI talent in the past, but he’s also hiring former colleagues from JPMorgan’s cloud-based risk calculation platform, Athena.
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Citadel has hired Ioana Nistoreanu as a software engineer working in commodities. She spent the last 12 years in Athena at JPMorgan and was most recently a managing director (MD) for the bank’s core engineering team. Nistoreanu’s move to Citadel also involves a relocation to Miami; Slinger is based in London.
Slinger and Nistoreanu worked together on Athena from 2014 to 2019 and both were executive directors (EDs) for the bulk of that time. Slinger got an MD promotion in UI and Nistoreanu made MD while sticking with the platform.
She’s not the only Athena alumnus to join in the past year. Last month, Citadel hired ED Zeme Olotu as a commodities engineer in New York and in July it hired vice president (VP) Lisa Huang in Houston.
Commodities at Citadel has been one of the hottest places in finance for some time now. Last year, a circa $600m bonus pot was split between 20 portfolio managers in its commodities team after the division made profits of $4bn. Commodities engineers may not see the bulk of that bonus, but are presumably valued highly for facilitating the team’s success.
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