Citadel’s 19 year-old engineering prodigy dropped out of school to compete in robotics

If you want insights into life at hedge fund Citadel, you could read what it’s like to be an analyst there, and – if you want to work in software engineering for Citadel, you could watch some videos made by one of Citadel’s new junior hires on TikTok. 

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Michael Khaykin, a software engineer on Citadel’s electronic engineering team in Miami, also happens to have a TikTok Channel. There, Khaykin offers non-Citadel specific advice on getting into electronic trading jobs, disproves notions that engineers and traders work ultra long hours, and shows off some of his branded merch. 

However, Khaykin isn’t just differentiated as a Citadel software engineer with a social media side-gig. He’s also a 19-year-old prodigy who graduated in electronic engineering from the University of Berkeley last summer and who chose his job at Citadel over working for NASA instead.

“I left middle school in eighth grade to compete in robotics competitions,” Khaykin tells us. “I was training for eight to ten hours a day, and my team and I ended up tying for the first place in the world. That was when I realized that I had a true passion for robotics and computing and that high school wouldn’t be right for me. I went straight to community college and started at Berkeley as a junior when I was 17.” 

It was while he was at Berkeley that Khaykin interned at NASA. It was while he was at Berkeley that Khaykin also discovered the existence of Citadel. “When I started at Berkeley I spoke with some students and alumni about internships. Citadel repeatedly came up as the most prestigious and competitive firm to get into, and that led me to apply,” he says. 

It wasn’t just prestige and competitiveness that led Khaykin to Citadel, though. He also spent a summer at Berkeley interning at NASA and realized that feedback loops at the government agency can be slow: “We were exploring a new type of communication system, and I was on a team focused on the process of going in and out of the atmosphere. It was a research project, and ultimately we were producing a paper on the topic,” he says. By comparison, when Khaykin interned at Citadel last summer, he says could “literally see the impact” of his algorithm being implemented.

Khaykin’s internship algorithm was all about “compressions,” which he describes as “taking multiple trades and representing them as a single trade.” It sounds simple, but isn’t. “I realized that at Citadel, I’d be working on solutions that would go into production even as an intern, and the fast feedback the market provides has been exciting,” he says.

Having arrived at Citadel aged only 19, Khaykin doesn’t have a five-year career plan. “Five years seems a long way away, so right now I don’t have specific plans for the long term,” he tells us. “But I’m super happy here. I’ve never felt bored and have been really stimulated by the work.”

Although Khaykin seems to be frequently lambasted on his TikTok channel for giving up the “best years of his life” to work when he could be studying or hanging out, he also says he has no intention right now of going for a PhD. “Having the flexibility that comes along with teaching myself in my own environment has worked well for me, whereas school is more constrained,” he says.

Khaykin hasn’t given up on robotics altogether, though: he’s invented a robot that waves its arm to prevent an automated sensor switching his light out. If other software engineers want to teach themselves, Khaykin advises tackling something like C++. – “If other software engineers want to teach themselves, Khaykin advises tackling something like C++. “It’s harder to write good C++ than to write code in other languages, but if you’re a talented C++ programmer you will find that you are able to pick up other languages fairly easily.”  

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