Hedge fund Citadel hired one of Morgan Stanley's top 0.3% engineers
The structure of tech teams in banking is a little different to the front office. While all the same rungs of the ladder are there from analyst to MD, tech staff also have the title of 'tech fellow' or 'distinguished engineer' (depending on the bank) which rewards people who are highly capable in a hands on technical role. While it can be an effective retention tactic, it also puts those people on the radar of major hedge funds.
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Alex Armstrong is a recent example of this. He was a distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley who recently joined Citadel as its head of optimization and execution within the fund's treasury engineering team. He spent the last 14 years at Morgan Stanley, eight of which as an executive director.
Armstrong only became a distinguished engineer 18 months ago. Business Insider wrote about what makes Morgan Stanley's distinguished engineers special back in 2024; it said that the title was given to just 0.3% of technologists, compared to ~3% for tech fellows at Goldman Sachs. It also said that distinguished engineers spend up to 20% of their time working on problems outside their business unit.
Armstrong is not the first distinguished engineer to join Citadel. London-based Mehdi Houshmand joined Citadel from Goldman Sachs last year, where he was a managing director and tech fellow of cloud engineering. Chenglong Yeh, another Goldman tech fellow, joined as a software engineer in New York at roughly the same time, although he was a VP at Goldman before he left.
Citadel founder Ken Griffin seems to be a fan of the title. Citadel Securities, the sister market making firm of Citadel, began employing people with that title as subject matter specialists in 2024, starting with C++ specialist Herb Sutter.
Citadel declined to comment while Morgan Stanley did not respond to a comment request.
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