Building our Engineering Team to Rebuild the Capital Markets

We started by tackling prime brokerage. Since launching in 2018, we have been rethinking and rebuilding the legacy systems that are currently used by the industry’s largest prime brokers–many of whom are household names in banking. Despite their size and scale, we understand that these players are relying on technology built 20–30 years ago. It’s no surprise that the client experience at these brokerages is less than ideal.

But building modern technical architectures for mission critical systems is hard, particularly when you’re skiing the steepest slope. Getting the right abstractions, contracts, ergonomics, correctness, and all the rest of it, are the details that add up to platforms that unlock value. We agonize over the details. And when we don’t get it quite right, we do it again until we do.

We are fundamentally oriented towards building platforms internally, and then dog-fooding those platforms for a specific use-case. We started with prime brokerage. But we believe the infrastructure we’re building within our platform can be instantiated beyond just prime brokerage.

It’s an ambitious mandate, and it can’t happen without an exceptional team behind it. Our team is everything, and they are at the frontlines of innovation. Over the course of 3-years, we have grown from a scrappy team of 3 engineers (including myself) to 80+, along with expanding product and design teams.

I wanted to take the time to highlight some recent leadership hires we have added to our engineering organization.

Madhu and Emilio are recent joiners to Clear Street’s engineering team.

Emilio Schapira, Engineering Lead — Clearing & Custody; Infrastructure

Emilio joined us after years of experience in lead engineering roles at Waze and the Google Cloud Platform. Here at Clear Street, Emilio leads our Clearing & Custody, and Infrastructure teams.

Madhu Subbu, Engineering Lead — Securities Financing

Madhu leads Clear Street’s Securities Financing engineering team. Securities finance is an area ripe for innovation. Prior to Clear Street, Madhu was CEO of Enigmatch, working to automate OTC markets through the use of combinatorial auction technology. He’s also held senior engineering roles at Chainalysis, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse.

Emilio and Madhu are joining an outstanding team of engineering leads, including:

• Eric Huffman, Engineering Lead — Electronic Execution Services Eric joined Clear Street from Akuna Capital where he was a Senior Software Developer. Prior to that he spent 9+ years at Citadel Securities developing the firm’s next generation trading platform for broker-dealer and institutional equity and equity options clients.
• Stuart Martin, Engineering Lead — Client Products Stuart leads our Product Engineering efforts at Clear Street after gaining years of experience as an engineer at firms including Blackstone and Wise (formerly Transferwise), and as a software developer at Microsoft and Amazon.
• John Sloboda, Engineering Lead — Data, Research & Analytics John has been with Clear Street for more than two years now (a firm veteran!) and now leads our Data, Research, and Analytics function. He previously worked as a software engineer at Google, MakeSpace, and numerous early stage startups.
• Arvind Vanthavasi, Engineering Lead — Risk & Portfolio Analytics Arvind brings a wealth of industry experience to Clear Street’s Risk & Portfolio Analytics team, having previously held senior roles at PDT Partners, Morgan Stanley, and Deloitte Australia.
• David Harks, Engineering Lead — Factual Data Davidcomes to Clear Street after spending many years cultivating his engineering skill set at firms like Citadel and Balyasny Asset Management. He leads our FACT Data team, which manages the factual data that is used throughout our firm.

Our engineering leads work with our extremely talented product and design teams to build brokerage infrastructure that underlies our platform, which in turn unlocks our ability to disrupt prime brokerage, and so much more in the near future.

As a team, we are so excited about the future and our mission!