Hedge fund Citadel hired a JPMorgan MD 18 months after leaving Meta
After leaving Meta for JPMorgan last year, Jake Johnson's time in banking has come to an end. Rather than returning to Big Tech, though, the technologist has moved to the buy-side and joined hedge fund Citadel.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
Johnson announced via LinkedIn that he's joining Citadel as its head of site reliability engineering. He spent the last 18 months as an MD and JPMorgan's head of web, where he led a 250-person team responsible for maintaining the bank's React framework and UX systems for consumer facing applications, including its digibank Chase.
Johnson worked for both Meta and AWS across a five-year stint in Big Tech. At the latter, he was a senior manager in its solutions architecture team. At the former, he worked on cluster management system Twine (then known as Tupperware). Before that, he spent the bulk of his career at General Electric.
Leaving Meta for banking may have been seen as a peculiar move at the time Johnson left, but cultural developments since then have shown that the two industries are more similar than they first appear. In January, Meta cut 5% of its lowest performers with a focus on 'non-regrettable attrition' (i.e. staff that wouldn't be missed). More recently, it has brought employees in its Instagram team back to the office five days per week, and is planning to assess its employees on their AI skills in 2026.
Hedge funds have been picking up Big Tech alums from graduate to senior level in recent years. Citadel itself hired Marcus Nascimento, a Meta engineer of eight years, in August. That month, quant fund Qube hired Richard Scothern, a Meta production engineer of eight years, as a high-performance computing engineer.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
