Why did the top technologist in financial services join Optiver?
Electronic trading giant Optiver just hired a new CTO, and he's one of the most important technologists in financial services. Lance Braunstein has spent the past six years as a senior member of BlackRock's Aladdin team but has decided to "pass the baton" and move on to HFT.
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It's a curious move; Optiver is big as far as HFTs go, but tiny compared to BlackRock. Optiver had ~2000 employees at the end of 2024 whereas BlackRock hired almost double that in 2024 alone and has over 21,000 total employees. Optiver generated $2.8bn in yearly revenue according to its most recent annual report from 2023. BlackRock generated over $20bn last year, with Aladdin and Braunstein playing a big role.
Aladdin is BlackRock's risk and portfolio management monolith; it's comprised of tens of millions of lines of code and used by a number of top firms across finance, all of whom pay BlackRock handsomely to use it. Braunstein joined BlackRock as head of the Aladdin product group in mid 2019, then became head of Aladdin engineering four years later.
One of Braunstein's main initiatives at BlackRock was the hiring of cloud specialists and a transition to a "cloud mindset." This might be his reason for joining Optiver.
Optiver has previously described itself as a "non-cloud trading environment." Now might be the chance to change. If so, Braunstein's arrival will likely lead to the firm's expansion in the cloud infrastructure space. Other trading firms have been dipping their toes into the cloud; Citadel Securities announced a partnership with Google last year to build a quant research platform on Google Cloud. Optiver itself has hired a few cloud people in recent years, including Karun Kallakuri, a high-performance computing specialist formerly of hedge fund Citadel.
Braunstein may be more focused on reinforcing that cloud mindset, rather than cloud infrastructure. A blog from the firm said the firm implements an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practice that's rare for physical infrastructure but common when using cloud infrastructure.
Braunstein also launched some generative AI tools under the Aladdin banner, including a coding copilot. He also said the firm implemented company-wide mandatory prompt engineering training. This is another area Optiver seems not to have leaned to heavily into yet, but could do now that Braunstein is incoming.
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