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There is a lot of exceptional fintech talent out there, finance probably has the deepest tech talent level of any industry. But if you look at the tech stack an

There is a lot of exceptional fintech talent out there, finance probably has the deepest tech talent level of any industry. But if you look at the tech stack and skills they are looking for for Sr Software Engineer, it looks like they are hiring for a web app: "Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis" Sorry, you can't build a financial exchange on Ruby, Node, and Mongo. Get some real fintech people in there with a real tech stack - core Java (not some Swing framework junk) and c++ mostly - and let them do their thing. These are fairly well understood problems. I don't understand how they can run on such a terrible infrastructure and still be considered a leader.

red_admiral 9y ago
> Sorry, you can't build a financial exchange on Ruby, Node, and Mongo. To anyone doubting this (particularly the MongoDB part): it has been tried before, with bad results. Look up "flexcoin".
sushid 9y ago
To me, MongoDB is the most shocking aspect of their stack. What are you doing with a non-ACID compliant database? I've personally had a transfer of ETH worth tens of thousands of dollars just go missing, despite 30+ confirmations on the tx on the blockchain itself, which took about 48 hours to resolve with their support team. If you can't credit your clients properly despite the fact that all transactions send/received are on the goddamn blockchain, you're doing something wrong.
- jnordwick 9y ago
  There is a thing in trading we call a drop copy that is basically a side channel verification of trades (besides the normal execution messages you get in the order stream). House trades and street (market) trades are constantly being verified and double checked against each other. I'm surprised they don't have something similar to catch these errors.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Sorry, you can't build a financial exchange on Ruby, Node, and Mongo. You can build a financial exchange on pen & paper, so you can probably do so on Ruby/Node/Mongo/Postgres/Redis. Those might not be the best choices for a tech stack, though, but there's a difference between “can’t” and “shouldn’t”.

red_admiral 9y ago

> Sorry, you can't build a financial exchange on Ruby, Node, and Mongo. To anyone doubting this (particularly the MongoDB part): it has been tried before, with bad results. Look up "flexcoin".

sushid 9y ago

To me, MongoDB is the most shocking aspect of their stack. What are you doing with a non-ACID compliant database? I've personally had a transfer of ETH worth tens of thousands of dollars just go missing, despite 30+ confirmations on the tx on the blockchain itself, which took about 48 hours to resolve with their support team. If you can't credit your clients properly despite the fact that all transactions send/received are on the goddamn blockchain, you're doing something wrong.

jnordwick 9y ago
There is a thing in trading we call a drop copy that is basically a side channel verification of trades (besides the normal execution messages you get in the order stream). House trades and street (market) trades are constantly being verified and double checked against each other. I'm surprised they don't have something similar to catch these errors.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Sorry, you can't build a financial exchange on Ruby, Node, and Mongo. You can build a financial exchange on pen & paper, so you can probably do so on Ruby/Node/Mongo/Postgres/Redis. Those might not be the best choices for a tech stack, though, but there's a difference between “can’t” and “shouldn’t”.