The internship outside of finance that could get you a job at Citadel
Breaking into Citadel or Citadel Securities is daunting challenge. For students and entry level professionals, having previous internships might help, even if they're not in the financial services sector.
Although Citadel and Citadel Securities don't target students with automotive backgrounds in particular, several of their recent hires have come from the sector. This seems to be more often the case at Citadel, the hedge fund, than Citadel Securities, the high speed market making platform.
Tesla, for example, appears to be a source of junior talent. At Citadel, junior hires that have interned at Tesla include graduate software engineer Safal Wagle and quantitative research intern Jasper Chen.
Tesla alumni are also popular at other buy side firms. HFT firm Hudson River Trading hired algorithm engineer Andy Xiao as an intern after a stint at Tesla and hired him full time this February. This month, rival hedge fund, Millennium hired data scientist Srivats Narasimhan from Blackrock, though he interned at Tesla prior to getting a role there.
Other automotive companies have lost people to hedge funds too. Kevin Chu interned at Ford (and IMC Trading) and was hired as a quant research engineer by Citadel in February. At a senior level, Citadel's COO of platform engineering, Kilian Gersing, interned for BMW during their studies.
Tesla has a large number of internships on offer: 182 in North America alone. 50 of those are in engineering and, information technology with a number of other teams such as vehicle software and robotics offering similar roles.
However, the quantity of roles comes at the cost of compensation. Levels.fyi's 2022/23 internship guide estimates average Tesla internship pay as $50.48 per hour or $8,750 per month. This is less than half of Levels' estimates for pay at Citadel and Citadel securities, where interns can earn $120 per hour or $20,800.
If you can't get an automotive internship enroute to a hedge fund job, there are other industries that will embellish your CV too. Video game development has always been a prestige industry with engineering interns at Riot Games in particular seeing recent success. Riot, however, are not currently offering any internships
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