Citadel SWAT commander defects to Jane Street's UX team
Citadel X, the UX division of Ken Griffin's hedge fund, has been likened to a SWAT team, called in when needed to assist other teams on front and back office engineering problems. After three and a half years in this crack group of UX professionals, one of its leaders has moved to algorithmic trading firm Jane Street.
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Zethus Suen has joined Jane Street in an ambiguously named "design" role, where he says he will be "tinkering." Suen's role at Citadel was a bit more formal, serving as Citadel X's head of design.
Suen previously spent three years at Two Sigma, where he led a design team for the hedge fund's quantified commercial insurance business. He was also a founding design member of the studio engineering group at streaming giant Netflix.
In a Jane Street Signals and Threads podcast last year, NASA alum Erin Murphy said she was the only UX designer at the firm, but that the team was "actively looking to add more people." The team now looks to have four people; Jane Street also hired Colin Keaney as a staff UX designer last month from cloud optimization infrastructure firm Vantage. That same month, it also hired Larissa Horn, a product designer from Deloitte that worked on UX for UBS' Wealthway app.
Citadel's UX team is a little larger. It had ~20 people in 2023, led by Google alum Kristofer Baxter. The team is working on a centralized application framework called Citadel One.
Experience at a streaming service seems to be common among UX leaders. Murphy of Jane Street was formerly a UX designer at HBO for its Go and Now platforms, while Baxter, like Suen, previously worked for Netflix.
It's not just trading firms, banks seem to value UX people highly as of late. Large numbers of UX people, particularly at VP level, have been joining US banks in 2025. At one US bank, known to have paid poor tech bonuses, a senior UX person told us they were "very pleased" with their bonus.
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