Trading firms are rewiring around data and AI. The question is no longer whether it's necessary, but who will execute the transition and how fast.
The data and AI talent pool in commodities and energy is thin. The profiles that drive real transformation are engineers who understand lakehouse architecture and can deploy agentic AI workflows, practitioners who can build models that account for physical market constraints, governance leads who can make data trustworthy enough to trade on. They are not waiting on job boards.
Cititec has been placing data and technology talent into commodities and energy firms for over 28 years. We understand the difference between a strong data engineer and one who can operate inside a trading environment, and we know where to find the latter.
The talent pool for data and AI roles in commodities and energy is small. The profiles that add the most value are rarely the ones with the most obvious CVs.
Firms that hire exclusively from competitors inherit the same assumptions, the same architectures, and the same limitations. The data and AI leaders who have driven genuine transformation in this space have often come from adjacent domains: big tech, financial services, systematic hedge funds, and academic research. They bring methodologies and toolsets that trading firms have not yet seen.
At the same time, technical depth without trading domain knowledge tends to produce models that look right but behave wrong. The combination of genuine quantitative or engineering capability with an understanding of how physical markets work, how ETRM systems are structured, and how trading desks actually make decisions is what separates a good hire from a transformative one.
We have been building networks across both sides of that equation for over 28 years.
Where we recruit
We place data and AI talent across the full range of commodities and energy trading environments:
By market
Power, natural gas, LNG, crude oil, refined products, emissions and carbon, metals, biofuels and RINs, and agricultural commodities.
By firm type
Trading houses, utilities and energy suppliers, oil and gas majors, investment banks' commodities desks, prop trading firms, systematic funds, and the technology firms and consultancies serving them.
By geography
London, Geneva, Zurich, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Houston, New York, Singapore, and Dubai. We place both permanent and contract candidates across all of these markets.
