A crypto hedge fund hiring from Citadel Securities wants to double in size
Kbit, a crypto hedge fund and high-frequency market maker, may be selling itself a bit short when it describes itself as a “growing” team. After hiring a few senior alums from established TradFi firms, the fund looks like it wants to more than double in size.
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Kbit says it has “~12 employees”… and 17 open job listings. It’s hiring quant, algorithmic trading, DevOps and trade operations engineers across the US, London, Hong Kong and Singapore. These are all full-time on-site positions, despite social media data suggesting the company doesn’t even have any employees in Hong Kong or London yet.
Job listings suggest the company is working astoundingly light. Kbit has “basically no UIs, all development is back-end relating to our automated trading system.” It describes its culture as “casual, scientific, and engineering focused” with “zero red tape.”
Kbit’s team is stacked with hedge fund, HFT and crypto veterans. Its founder and CEO is Ed Tolson, formerly director of trading technology at Citadel. CTO/COO Marc Zeitouni spent three years at HFT firm Tower Research Capital’s as its head of product for global trading systems, and was also CTO of crypto investment bank Galaxy Digital.
Many people have used crypto in the past to skirt their garden-leave periods, and Tolson is no exception, only he’s sticking around. He previously said on a podcast that he began Kbit as a “side project” while on Garden leave, in 2017. As bitcoin’s price exploded, Kbit “exploded into a real business.” This January, he announced it had over $100m in assets under management.
Now, in 2024, Tolson’s bringing in some big names. Thomas Johnson, formerly a senior quant developer at Citadel Securities, joined last month as a principal research engineer. Back in February, Kbit also hired Sean Slotterback, formerly a PM and head of statistical arbitrage at Tower Research Capital.
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