A PhD is not obligatory for an entry-level job at Citadel Securities. But the electronic trading firm routinely hires PhDs, particularly into its quant researcher roles. And when it does, it has a preference for a particular range of subject areas.

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As befits a quantitative trading firm, Citadel Securities says it likes its PhD hires to be specialists in areas of mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science or other "highly quantitative" fields. "Strong knowledge" of probability and statistics helps. So does experience translating algorithms into Python, R and C++. In return for this expertise, Citadel Securities pays its PhD interns between $4.3k and $5.8k, per week. 

Getting one of these PhD internships is not easy. Citadel Securities employs 1,700 people globally; 260 of them are PhDs. Citadel Securities' PhDs haven't only studied applied mathematics and computer engineering. They've also written dissertations on bioinformatics and geophysics. 

If you're looking for some more specific pointers on PhD subjects that might facilitate a Citadel Securities job, some of the topics covered by its recently recruited quantitative researchers with PhDs may be informative. Yichen Yang wrote on Player Capability and Locally Sub-Optimal Behavior in Strategic Games for his PhD in computer science at MIT. Tongzheng Ren wrote on a dissertation titled, 'Towards provable and practical reinforcement learning with representation learning for his PhD in computer science at the University of Texas, Austin.  Geoffrey Ji wrote a dissertation on, 'Microscopic control and dynamics of a Fermi-Hubbard system' for his PhD in physics at Harvard, and conducted experiments with ultra-cold atoms.

Citadel Securities runs annual summits for eager PhD students to indicate their interest. Unfortunately, the summits have now passed for 2025, but more are due next year. 

Speaking at the most recent summit, Guillaume Basse, a quant researcher who was formerly an assistant professor at Stanford in the MS&E and statistics department at Harvard (and who wrote his dissertation on “New frontiers in causal inference: learning from experiments in a networked world”) said Citadel Securities is preferable to academia because feedback there is much quicker. "You have a great idea. You test it. You discuss it with colleagues, and you get a very rapid answer; maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you go back to the drawing board, and you fix the issue, and you go back again," Basse declared.

Ji suggested Citadel Securities is more stimulating than cold atoms. Not only do you get to see the fruits of your labours immediately, but by working in market making he said you're, "helping the markets behave in a more efficient manner, and that helps society at large.” 

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