Coinbase loses Citadel director, hires ex-HFT product head
Coinbase has been steadily ramping up its hiring recently; Q3 was its most prolific since 2022, but it hasn't all been incomings. The fintech recently lost an engineer that it hired from hedge fund Citadel.
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Francesco Laurita left Coinbase last week to become a principal engineer at Checkr, a startup providing background checking-technology. He spent three and a half years as a senior staff engineer at the Coinbase after joining from Citadel, where he was a director of engineering for four and a half years. The hedge fund hired him via its acquisition of Gild, a data science platform that analyzes developer coding skill.
While Coinbase is growing, Checkr has been cutting staff. It laid off 32% of its staff in April for the "long term health" of the business.
Coinbase is still a destination for TradFi alums. This month, it hired Marc Zeitouni as a director of product for its markets team. He was formerly head of product for HFT firm Tower Research Capital's global trading systems but has held a number of roles in crypto since.
He was CTO and head of product at crypto investment bank Galaxy Digital, then a partner at crypto hedge fund Kbit. He was most recently CTO at crypto payments firm Fun.xyz, but lasted only five months in the role before taking the new gig at Coinbase.
Coinbase is also bringing back some old faces. Former chief architect Rob Witoff has rejoined Coinbase as head of platform after stints at Google and VC firm Polychain Capital. Associate general counsel David Shafer returned back in October after leaving for crypto market maker Wintermute, where he lasted just 15 months.
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