Goldman Sachs made a very big hire in trading technology 

Goldman Sachs has made a big appointment to its equities technology team, hiring Matt Kilsby, the former chief operating officer of Systematica Investments, as a managing director.

Kilsby had been a non-executive director at Systematica since July 2017 and Goldman therefore seems to have brought him out of semi-retirement. Launched in 2015, Systematica is a multi-strategy spin-off of BlueCrest Capital Management's systematic trading division.

Kilsby's arrival comes as GS is strengthening its electronic trading capabilities. In October 2017, it brought in Mike Blum, the former chief technology officer at the high-frequency trading firm KCG Holdings as the CTO for its electronic trading unit. Blum is a partner based in Chicago, Kilsby will be based in London.

With the new role, Kilsby's career seems to have come to the full circle. He began his career with GS in 1996 after completing his software engineering from the University of Manchester. During the nine years he spent at GS, he held various technology roles covering risk, wealth management and fixed income trading, eventually becoming VP of FICC Electronic Trading.

He moved to Citadel in 2005 as the head of European technology. In 2009, he joined a high-frequency trading start-up to head business strategy and technology leadership, only to shift to UBS a year later as the MD and the EMEA head of equities IT. In early 2013, Kilsby joined BlueCrest Capital Management as the head of Systematic Technology. When Systematica Investments spun out two years later, he  joined as COO and CTO.

Last July. he assumed the role of non-executive director at Systematica. Now he's back at the coal face.

As we reported last week, Goldman Sachs is also hiring for a new team called ION, which is building trading and pricing systems from scratch for flow products in the fixed income market.