HFT firm Optiver hired hedge fund Citadel's 22-year performance compute veteran
High-frequency trading firm Optiver has been making some major hires in its technology team in 2025. Earlier this year, it hired the head of engineering for Aladdin at Blackrock to become its CTO, and announced plans for expansion in New York. Now it has hired the former head of compute infrastructure at hedge fund Citadel.
Scott Donovan has emerged at Optiver in Chicago as an infrastructure lead after a ten-month gardening leave period. He spent 22 years at Citadel, and worked on multiple burgeoning technologies there. He joined as a high-performance computing architect and implemented the first general-purpose GPU workload in CUDA, which he said "achieved 140x speedup of a trinomial tree option model." He was one of Citadel's earliest cloud engineers, and founded the team that "built [its] container orchestration platform." He also spent three and a half years as Citadel's head of Linux engineering, before becoming head of compute infrastructure on an interim basis.
Donovan was one of many Citadel employees to join from Goldman Sachs. He was a VP at the bank in the early 2000s, working on high-frequency trading infrastructure. Other Goldmanites include CTO Umesh Subramanian, and current global head of compute engineering Ruslan Kharitonov.
Optiver has a well-established infrastructure team, but it's primarily known for its work with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). An job opening for a high-performance computing engineer at Optiver in New York said that the firm has a "diverse compute capabilities, including CPU, GPU, and specialized processing solutions."
Donovan isn't just a veteran of computing infrastructure. Before joining finance, he also says he was a US Marine.
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