30 ms·

Ask HN: What programming skills are required by HFT or Trading firms

217 points by mraza007 6y ago

What are some skills required to land a job in Trading Firm especially in roles like DevOps or developing software. How can a person excel at the technologies required by these firms

fwsgonzo 6y ago
These days I would say you should get into OS development and learn about unikernels. Linux should be a solved problem right now and the future would be in OSes that don't have interrupts enabled and you have full control over the CPU cores.
- mraza007 6y ago
  I see I’m currently programming mostly in python at my day job do you any good resources i could consume to gain more knowledge on OSes
  - fwsgonzo 6y ago
    This is not a joke: Read the Intel manual, maybe check out some of the learning repos on github that solves all the glue-stuff that isn't important. I have one such repo here: https://github.com/fwsGonzo/barebones https://github.com/fwsGonzo/barebones
    - mraza007 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing that Out of curiosity do you work for trading firms
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Andrew Tanenbaums book is good for the theory. Real world is a bit blurred so it's also worth reading about some modern development like eBPF (very handy for tracing too)
  - bromonkey 6y ago
    I started learning kernel internals from these books, I highly recommend all of them. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (free online) - Arpaci-Dusseau Linux Device Drivers, 3rd ed (o'Reilly) - Jonathan Corbet The Linux Programming Interface - Michael Kerrisk The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd ed) - McKusick, McKusick, Watson Solaris Internals - McDougall, Richard, Mauro
- bromonkey 6y ago
  `Linux should be a solved problem right now` This is a joke right? Unix is not even a solved problem and it's been around 50+ years.
- usefulcat 6y ago
  For ultra low-latency trading, I'd look into FPGAs before going that route.
remyp 6y ago
C/C++ is most common. Good luck getting their attention if you didn’t go to MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Even with the experience you have Won’t get there attention That’s crazy
- s1t5 6y ago
  This + willingness to work absurd hours.
  - mraza007 6y ago
    Agreed i heard from few friends they worked crazy hours plus it was a high stress job
    - michaelcampbell 6y ago
      Some time before HFT was as popular, I worked at a Wall St. trading firm (though in the back office clearance and settlement area). The devs who supported the traders had some wild "high stress" stories; it was pretty routine and commonplace for them to be screamed at nonstop by multiple traders during the entire trading day, then everyone would go out for drinks/dinner afterwards. Daily. There was a paramedic on the trading floor. At least once a trader had a heart attack and the other traders were just casually stepping over him post-collapse, because... paramedic on the trading floor. It was my first job post-college; in the first or second week I was there, a company wide email went out that stated the policy for in-office birthday parties was being changed in that strippers would no longer be reimbursed. Out of office it was still ok. Anyone interested in those times should read "Liar's Poker"; it's a good overview, at least from what I remember, since where I worked was that same firm.
      - jmeister 6y ago
        Those days are long gone. Technologists are highly respected now. Also the backgrounds of traders have changed slowly. More cerebral, less jocky. So the cultural and pay gap has reduced
franze 6y ago
>How can a person excel at the technologies required by these firms from my fintech experience with the financial departments there ... excel in Excel. it's a whole programming-parallel-world
- mraza007 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more, I have met people doing entire risk modelling in excel. It's a pretty powerful tool but nowadays everyone in financial world in emphasizing on the importance Python and Pandas. Even Non Technical people in financial industries are encouraged to learn Python for instance departments like Audit and etc
- whatok 6y ago
  For HFT? Absolutely not. For trading? The original poster needs to clarify what they mean by "trading" as this is probably still the case for most tech-driven prop trading firms.
  - mraza007 6y ago
    Yup mostly tech driven trading shops use technology that’s why they have competitive edge compared to banks
  - AllanHoustonSt 6y ago
    You’d be surprised at how many traders and QRs in HFT (or at least in OMM) often reach for Excel. Granted this is way more common among older people in the industry. And as a technologist OP wouldn’t have to worry about writing or maintaining Excel scripts :p
    - whatok 6y ago
      Excel is a very effective tool for many things but suggesting that it would be useful to spend time learning Excel to prepare for HFT is really bad advice.
- carlsborg 6y ago
cheezebubba 6y ago
Well you can take a look at their job openings pages: https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/ https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/ Looks like c++, python, and linux sysadmin stuff.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Do you work at HRT. just curious
necrotic_comp 6y ago
DevOps - standard tools, depends on the firm Trading Systems - C++, networking, memory management. * I work at a HFT firm building algos for clients
- mraza007 6y ago
  Nice building algo requires heavy math knowledge correct me if I’m wrong Most firms look for masters or Phds for that type of role
  - logicchains 6y ago
    "Building algos for clients" may refer to implementing the algos designed by traders/quants.
kasey_junk 6y ago
HFT and Trading firms are largely like any other firms. They have job postings and the skillset they expect is largely what you’d expect. https://www.virtu.com/careers/ https://www.virtu.com/careers/ has a devops role listed within the first 10 results on their careers page. It looks like basically any other modern ops job sheet. Here is one for DRW https://drw.com/careers/job/1280794 https://drw.com/careers/job/1280794 again, not much different than any other firm. Most software written at trading firms is the same as software written anywhere else. The only real differences are on the actual tick to trade path, where you will see the need for FPGA/ASIC programming, very low level network programming and C/C++ systems programming or on the Quant side which can vary widely but typically involves showing PHD level research skills in some hard math/science.
pmart123 6y ago
I used to work in HFT, but haven’t for five years. For core developers, there’s heavy use of C/C++ with a deep understanding of low level programming. On the trade strategy development side, it’s usually some combination of a columnar database, Python/R along with rewriting performance sensitive areas in a lower level language. I won’t be surprised if there was an uptick in the usage of GO the last few years as well.
morelandjs 6y ago
Suppose you have top notch data science and machine learning chops and also suppose quant shops are willing to hire you regardless of your financial domain expertise. In such a scenario, is the 99th percentile of quant compensation significantly higher than the 99th percentile of tech company compensation (FANG etc)? I've always considered this a fork in the road for many---finance versus say advertising--and I'm curious how others with more experience would describe the pros and cons of each.
- rubidium 6y ago
  If you want to pursue money, then yes both are your best options. Not really a significant difference, you’re just a cog in some billionaires machine extracting your soul for $$$. Avoid both and Choose to make a difference in people’s lives.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    It is very difficult to make a positive difference in anyone’s life with his given skills. The best he can do is not actively make anyone else’s life worse, so go with finance, and adopt a shelter animal.
    - jghn 6y ago
      There are plenty of opportunities for people with their skill set in the realm of biomedical research.
    - superhuzza 6y ago
      >It is very difficult to make a positive difference in anyone’s life with his given skills. Based on what? Anecdotal, but my partner is a data scientist and statistician full-time . She regularly volunteers or contracts her skillset to a range of projects, including medical research and criminal justice. It's very impactful work - some of the research will massively improve people's lives. And there is definitely enough work to mostly focus on those projects if someone wants to.
idohft 6y ago
Agreed with the rest, you should just look at job descriptions. Different firms use different technologies, but a devops person will probably be building tooling for monitoring live trading, or GUIs for themselves and traders. These tend to not be as performance-sensitive. If you want to work on the trading systems, you should be good OS-level and network-level things. And you should probably know C/C++. I think some firms might still use Java. Good firms have probably been around for a couple of years, so it's unlikely that they'll use the cool new languages of the day.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Cool new languages don’t provide any competitive advantage. You will not be doing HFT with Rust or Haskell or whatever.
  - emidln 6y ago
    That's not true. Source: I work at an HFT. Rust is very interesting for Greenfield work. The major down side is millions of lines of legacy C++, the more useful already using C++17 or C++2a, which typically provides a lot of what you'd get out of Rust's stdlib and ecosystem but already packaged and integrated. When you choose Rust at an HFT you have to worry about integration with codegen tools (generating efficient Java/C++/$HDL and reasonable throughput Python for protocol definitions is table stakes at any HFT I've heard of) and build pipelines (which might already have distributed building/caching infrastructures and fancy packaging/deployment. Rust has some benefits (and still integrates reasonably well at the ABI level), but modern C++ compilers are no slouches. Rust provides a friendly dev experience, which is a valuable thing, but a lot of the ecosystem advantages are old hat at companies with mature codebases.
    - mraza007 6y ago
      I think Jane Street is using OCaml I’m not sure why did they decided to go with functional programming even though most popular firms are still using C/C++ Do you think using functional programming might have advantage over these programming languages Just curious to find out
pjmlp 6y ago
Basically Java, .NET and C++, with heavy focus on C++. Being able to write allocation free algorithms, even on GC languages, lock free data structures and good knowledge of all multi-core programming paradigms and distributed computing. Here are some talks that will give you a small overview into that world, CppCon 2017: Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM Core C++ 2019 :: Nimrod Sapir :: High Frequency Trading and Ultra Low Latency development techniques https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aU8S-hFQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aU8S-hFQI Open source Java HFT code from Chronicle Software, https://github.com/OpenHFT https://github.com/OpenHFT "Writing and Testing High-Frequency Trading Engines", from Cliff Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iINk7x44MmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iINk7x44MmM However in these domains every ms counts, even how long cables are, so also expect Verilog, VHDL, and plenty of custom made algorithms running directly on hardware. "A Low-Latency Library in FPGA Hardware for High-Frequency Trading" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFcM1pGOIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFcM1pGOIE You can get an overview of the typical expectations here, https://www.efinancialcareers.com/ https://www.efinancialcareers.com/
- willcipriano 6y ago
  > allocation free algorithms Do you have any good sources for information about this concept? I'm having trouble understanding how a algorithm could produce useful work without allocating anything.
  - aliceryhl 6y ago
    An algorithm might be: Take an array of integers as input and return their sum. Returning or adding integers does not require allocating memory.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      I presume you mean allocating new memory. You could sum an array and keep track of state/store cumulative sum in the existing array i.e. in-place algorithmic approaches: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-place_algorithm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-place_algorithm You still have to have memory and use it though, somewhere.
talolard 6y ago
I used to work for a firm that did FIX parsers for hft. FIX is the standard protocol for financial data. Company’s claim to fame was the fastest parser on standard hardware as opposed to an FPGA and handling the many many dialects of FIX. A lot of work and skill went to memory layout (minimize cache missed), lock free data structures and spending time in perf looking for ways to shave microseconds off a function. God knows how I got the job, I was super junior , but that’s the kind of work we did and presumably what other companies would want you competent with
- throwfin11 6y ago
  HFT firms would likely use the exchange binary protocols where available over FIX. Ie: OUCH/ITCH, Pillar etc. With that said, FIX is still relevant on many exchanges and in wide use by the broker/dealers etc...
unixhero 6y ago
Nobody has mentioned the K language and Q language; and the Kdb+ product from KX Systems. I know many institutions and HFT's use the K Database. It's fast because it crunches data in the CPU cache which is insanely fast. Reference: https://code.kx.com/ https://code.kx.com/
- throwfin11 6y ago
  kdb+ would be used for analysis or slower signal generation. it's not low latency for trading applications.
jdub 6y ago
Whatever skills they put on the job description along with no scruples or moral standards whatsoever.
Unklejoe 6y ago
They usually ask for C/C++, but what they really mean is C++.
- ryanianian 6y ago
  Not just "C++" but usually they want C++ experience that is very relevant to precisely what the hiring manager wants. Maybe I'm sour-grapes, but I got pretty far through a HFT loop only to get turned away because I didn't have any experience with the particular boost library they were using. (A library that will be mostly obsolete by C++20) They said that this was common in the industry.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >because I didn't have any experience with the particular boost library they were using. (A library that will be mostly obsolete by C++20) Brave of you to assume they'd be able to use C++20. Unfortunately HFTs are just as susceptible to "stuck on an ancient version of GCC" as any other C++ shop, so maybe you dodged a bullet there.
Jhsto 6y ago
From the anecdotal experience of developing such software as a side-project for myself, the hardest parts technically were dealing with concurrency and race conditions caused by it. Other skills for prosperity is understanding statistical significance and randomness. Also, writing reliable software and designing both the best-case and worst-case scenarios is required when interfacing with remote systems: brokers return error or exception cases saying you were too slow all the time, which means your software is dependant on that information and must run in probabilistic state conditions while waiting for the answers to remain performant.
- fareesh 6y ago
  When dealing with race-conditions, is the skill required just the ability to identify candidates where the race-condition will occur and then apply the relevant locking features around the mutations? What are the implications of identifying a scenario where there is no race condition? Does it just result in a performance hit?
  - Jhsto 6y ago
    In my case, I still have unexplainable race conditions in my software, so take it with a grain of salt. But yes, identification and understanding both the locking and synchronization are hard. I don't think there are many other definitive solutions than modeling your software in a predicate language like TLA+ or Alloy, especially once your software grows hence its possible states diverge. > What are the implications of identifying a scenario where there is no race condition? No race condition? Great. It's totally possible there are some not-so-concurrent parts of your software that can run in what I deem a performant manner. > Does it just result in a performance hit? It's much more than that. A bug I have is very serious and it goes something like this: you set a limit order to buy X shares. The limit order gets a partial fulfillment, and you immediately set stop losses and take profits for X shares. However, the limit order gets complete fulfillment before the two other requests are done. If you now try to update the previous orders, for example, it might be that the update call gets registered at the broker first, but the creation gets there last, which means you have bought X+Y shares, but you have stop losses and take profits for only the X. You might now completely lose Y unless you monitor the software all the time. Things like these might happen everywhere, and the real trouble starts when these instances with plausible race conditions of their own start communicating with other parts which might also have race conditions. And the requirement for the concurrency is not only a performance: you might want to collect data in thread N, while you have different strategies of amount M, which all by default subscribe to N, but only selectively when they are doing their strategies. In such a sense, I don't think that doing even a semi-serious trading software without concurrency is possible.
notinventedhear 6y ago
From 4 years in a large public quant house (not HFT): everything upstream of trade execution is Python with very heavy use of numpy, scipy and pandas. This has pros and cons, on balance I'd prefer a better type system, but that everyone in the org can share code has tremendous value at scale. Briefly, the faster your execution the faster everything else needs to be. Java should be fast enough for almost anything short of HFT + colocation which is super expensive infra wise. The skills are not different from other backend roles, but you will need to exercise more math with emphasis time series and stats.
hft09876 6y ago
I've worked at two of what are broadly considered to be the top firms. Most of these comments are inconsistent with my experience. Everybody's talking about what it takes to write trading systems, but OP asked about "skills required to land a job" not skills needed to do the job. Aside from a few specialized roles (like FPGA dev or security), the firms I'm familiar with only evaluate general dev skills. The interview process is pretty much the same as you'd experience at a top tech company. They don't care at all if you know the languages they use. Once you're in the door, the firm will teach you everything you need to know.
- derivativethrow 6y ago
  Which firms are broadly considered to the top ones?
  - PEJOE 6y ago
    Jane Street is one
  - nwsm 6y ago
    Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies possibly. Jane Street like the other reply mentioned
    - mraza007 6y ago
      What about Bridge water and Hudson river trading
      - JAlexoid 6y ago
        Bridgewater is not an HFT, they are a hedge fund. That being said - Bridgewater are looking for more than just skills. Bridgewater is very heavy on meetings and those meetings being recorded. You can ace the skillset, but would be completely inadequate. Their interview process is great. It's very honest and revealing. I don't fit the company and I made the decision at their campus interview, their opinion matched mine as well. But, unlike most other companies, you are shown exactly what the company is. Which is very good. If you can land an interview, you like them and get an offer - I hear that it's a pretty good place to work.
_asummers 6y ago
Trading firms have many positions available other than the HFT algorithms. There are teams that support those to enable desks (read: startups) to get off the ground quickly (like YC!), analysis teams for doing research for future strategies, accounting, shared service teams, as well as governance teams like risk, compliance, treasury. Depending on the team you're on, your job may be drastically different. I find myself in a role focusing on devops, developer tooling, and team automation, but others on my team focus on data ingestion, financial models on top of the data, UI development for end users. If you're a skilled programmer, there will be a role for you in a sufficiently large firm.
pclmulqdq 6y ago
I can only speak to HFT. For dev roles, Python experts (emphasis on expert) and experts in modern C++ have the easiest time. C experts and systems programmers with assembly expertise can also find a job, but the market is smaller for them (although higher-paying). OS-level and systems programming are valuable. Understanding computer architecture is important, and computer systems as well. Credentials are an important filtering mechanism for them, so if you didn't go to a top 10 school, your resume needs to make up for it (or you need to be a very experienced hire). Working at a FAANG company or a bank doesn't necessarily make up for not going to a top school. Successful devs at HFTs usually have a ~50-hour workweek or are very efficient programmers.
- mraza007 6y ago
  I wonder How can someone become an expert at python. Even though i have worked for two global banks as an intern but now I’m exploring to land a position in HFT to gain more financial/tech experience to become more well rounded person
  - efxhoy 6y ago
    I've written python for a living everyday for a few years now. No means an expert but IMO there are two core skills: Cleanliness and design. Learning and using language features that make code easier to build on, test, and deduce about. Basically writing code that's very nice to humans. Here python really shines. The second part is writing code that's very nice to machines and runs really fast and correctly. Multiprocessing, writing parts of the code in a compiled language for extra speed, using buffers for speed, async, that kind of thing. Easy enough for specific problems, the issue is that these performance tweaks often make code harder for humans to understand. Now writing a nice looking and well designed program is fairly easy. Making a really fast-but-ugly program is also fairly easy. The mark of a real expert in my opinion is combining these two abilities: writing code that's both human and machine friendly. As always, practice makes perfect. To practice you need to practice both, and on real data. Don't just use toy examples, get your hands on some big messy data that takes hours to crunch. Don't just write toy apps, keep writing and adding features until it becomes a huge stinking mess, then learn from that mess and do it again.
emidln 6y ago
The three biggest skills aren't directly tech: learning fast/efficiently, communication and execution under pressure, and perseverance/discipline to finish/deliver. Where I work, our devops use a mix of python/ruby/golang/bash for day to day debugging and development. Ability to read, understand, and modify Python (or a similar scripting language) and a familiarity with Bourne/bash are probably the minimum for devops. For operations, you'd want to bring some skills that add to the team in new skills or redundancy. You'll likely be trained/cross trained in many more. Familiarity with and ability to debug some of the following: databases, networked services (sometimes a pcap replay is all you have), systems troubleshooting, monitoring, queues, or specific hardware and software platforms we use. At the HFT I work at, we hire Jr and Sr people. For systems people, there is a bit of a divide between trading systems engineers, who work directly with devs and traders on the care+feeding of some corner of our software stack and infrastructure systems that provide shared tooling and substrates (k8s, deployment tooling, continuous integration/delivery, configuration management tooling, additional debugging help, etc). We also have network teams, traditional IT service desk teams, and performance monitoring/improvement teams. If you're not coming from trading, we still need all of the standard sysadmin and devops skills. We have SSH, Kafka, Zookeeper, MySQL/Maria, tcpdump/wireshark, Linux, Puppet, Docker, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, Hadoop, etc. We have misc custom file formats but also loads of json , some xml, etc. We integrate open source and proprietary as much or more than we build. Outside of the execution stack, you'd recognize a lot of what we do at any medium-sized tech company. If you want to talk about life at an HFT, my email is in profile. I came into HFT as an experienced hire from the startup world and currently do builds development.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Hey thanks for sharing I’ll send you an email and i would love to know more about HFTs since I’m currently an undergrad working for a financial company as intern at the moment and graduating soon On the side I’m exploring different career options and one of my top choices is to learn more about HFTs
mattbl 6y ago
Here's a nice (old) blog of someone in the industry: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
andrew-nguyen 6y ago
Besides searching on Glassdoor or Indeed, how can someone find a list of companies that are doing this type of work? Are they limited to the east coast? I'm not very familiar with the HFT industry, but the skills that they require (C++, computer architecture, OS, networking, & performance) are ones that I'm interested in and would love to deepen my experience with. Are there companies on the west coast (more specifically southern California) where one could develop this experience?
- mark-r 6y ago
  They'll probably be located close to an exchange so that they can colo the servers, but not all exchanges are on the east coast.
- lalalal123 6y ago
  They're actually mostly in Chicago! You can google proprietary trading.
madballster 6y ago
Not exactly known for HFT, but Man AHL use their own library arctic with Python/Pandas and MongoDB. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyIxdxsyok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyIxdxsyok - The presentation touches on performance considerations.
throwfin11 6y ago
HFT firms use all sorts of technologies. But to be clear, you want to be closest to trading - that's where the big money is; so either a) idea generation (quant work) or b) execution (dev work) For the execution piece, C++ would be the most viable option. On the quant/research piece, python/R/kdb are common tools used, but the real skills are the statistics/math and market knowledge.
brianolson 6y ago
Moral flexibility and subjugation. The boss says to build a thing, you build the thing. If rewriting an infiniband driver and pinning it to a core on the server and processing requests in kernel space in exquisitely crafted C is what cuts reation time by 0.0000005 sec and makes the firm a few extra bucks, that's what you do. I interviewed at a Manhattan HFT firm (~2015) and that's what they do. The boss noted that "Congress could make a law invalidating our business model" and I realized that would be a good idea. They're not making the world a better place; they're not providing a valuable service; they're just exploiting and extracting and skimming some dollars out of the market. They have money and they're in the right place so their money can grab more money.
- ensignavenger 6y ago
  What about re-writing and infiniband driver requires moral flexibility?
  - znpy 6y ago
    the goal behind the rewrite
    - jolmg 6y ago
      Cutting reaction time to make a few extra bucks? How does that require moral flexibility? Is the immoral part that they can use their money to make more money? If by earning more money, one can afford to buy more food in bulk and save money on that and gas, or buy a washing machine and save money on going to the laundromat, is that immoral of one to do?
      - PascLeRasc 6y ago
        Is that what hedge fund people do with their money, buy their first washing machine? Or are they buying apartments and leaving them empty to store their money?
        6y ago
andersonvaz 6y ago
Worth to mention is the https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/ https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/ A High Performance Inter-Thread Messaging Library used for HFT.
lalalal123 6y ago
I worked at one of the top tier prop shops in Chicago. This is my experience there: Fresh grad devs are generally evaluated on their potential and not what languages and specific skills they know. The people they end up hiring for fresh grad dev roles tended to come from the same six schools. Said schools are generally not top tier (for developers) and are local to Chicago.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Compared to New York, I think you'll find out more trading jobs in Chicago.
organicfigs 6y ago
I passed the interviews at one of the top stat arb hft firms and it sounds like there are a couple of responses from similar shops here. One thing people haven't mentioned: pedigree. I passed 3 rounds of interviews and my final interviewer was batting for me, when I didn't get the offer, he said the team was apprehensive because I didn't have the pedigree from MIT/Princeton like everyone else. He wasn't a fan of the decision because he worked at a string of failed startups himself prior to starting there, c'est la vie. Also for the curious, he said the salary range was 400-460k with ~3-5 yoe.
- keredson 6y ago
  this. i was involved in a lot of interviewing / hiring at one of the top quant firms. i was shocked at how much this factored in.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Why does going to good school really matter if you are bringing in top notch skills I think that's one the reason why financial companies are having a hard time retaining good tech talent but they pay really well compared to FAANG
- rokobobo 6y ago
  A hiring partner at an HFT firm once told me why they had a disproportionate number of people from MIT or Ivy League schools, especially for fresh grads: they selected for intelligence, coding skills etc., but they also needed people who could very quickly focus on the top priority tasks for the firm. (For example, if someone committed buggy code and the firm was losing out on profits because its algorithms weren't running, do you hunt down the bug or do you revert?) And it turns out that kids from Ivy League schools tend to be very good at constantly being aware of these top-level priorities for the firm. This applied for almost every front and mid office role in that firm: DevOps, algorithm developers, traders, researchers. I can't speak for all the firms out there, but I think at least my friend would happily substitute pedigree for another item on a person's resume that demonstrated experience with running a live system where downtime is very costly.
dilandau 6y ago
C++ was big. Comfortable navigating a very large and complex codebase, being able to understand complex rules-based systems, and of course knowledge of equities and financial markets. But they'll teach you everything you need to know as long as you can pass the interview.
szczepano 6y ago
for currencies / commodities zmq/java - lmax then there is forex c++ mt4 metaquotes more hardcore like cheetah-solutions fpga / hdl don't know about asic some insides but now inactive https://mdavey.wordpress.com/ https://mdavey.wordpress.com/ there are also options / stocks and cryptocurrencies

217 points by mraza007 6y ago

What are some skills required to land a job in Trading Firm especially in roles like DevOps or developing software. How can a person excel at the technologies required by these firms

fwsgonzo 6y ago

These days I would say you should get into OS development and learn about unikernels. Linux should be a solved problem right now and the future would be in OSes that don't have interrupts enabled and you have full control over the CPU cores.

mraza007 6y ago
I see I’m currently programming mostly in python at my day job do you any good resources i could consume to gain more knowledge on OSes
- fwsgonzo 6y ago
  This is not a joke: Read the Intel manual, maybe check out some of the learning repos on github that solves all the glue-stuff that isn't important. I have one such repo here: https://github.com/fwsGonzo/barebones https://github.com/fwsGonzo/barebones
  - mraza007 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing that Out of curiosity do you work for trading firms
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Andrew Tanenbaums book is good for the theory. Real world is a bit blurred so it's also worth reading about some modern development like eBPF (very handy for tracing too)
- bromonkey 6y ago
  I started learning kernel internals from these books, I highly recommend all of them. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (free online) - Arpaci-Dusseau Linux Device Drivers, 3rd ed (o'Reilly) - Jonathan Corbet The Linux Programming Interface - Michael Kerrisk The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd ed) - McKusick, McKusick, Watson Solaris Internals - McDougall, Richard, Mauro
bromonkey 6y ago
`Linux should be a solved problem right now` This is a joke right? Unix is not even a solved problem and it's been around 50+ years.
usefulcat 6y ago
For ultra low-latency trading, I'd look into FPGAs before going that route.

remyp 6y ago

C/C++ is most common. Good luck getting their attention if you didn’t go to MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc.

mraza007 6y ago
Even with the experience you have Won’t get there attention That’s crazy
s1t5 6y ago
This + willingness to work absurd hours.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Agreed i heard from few friends they worked crazy hours plus it was a high stress job
  - michaelcampbell 6y ago
    Some time before HFT was as popular, I worked at a Wall St. trading firm (though in the back office clearance and settlement area). The devs who supported the traders had some wild "high stress" stories; it was pretty routine and commonplace for them to be screamed at nonstop by multiple traders during the entire trading day, then everyone would go out for drinks/dinner afterwards. Daily. There was a paramedic on the trading floor. At least once a trader had a heart attack and the other traders were just casually stepping over him post-collapse, because... paramedic on the trading floor. It was my first job post-college; in the first or second week I was there, a company wide email went out that stated the policy for in-office birthday parties was being changed in that strippers would no longer be reimbursed. Out of office it was still ok. Anyone interested in those times should read "Liar's Poker"; it's a good overview, at least from what I remember, since where I worked was that same firm.
    - jmeister 6y ago
      Those days are long gone. Technologists are highly respected now. Also the backgrounds of traders have changed slowly. More cerebral, less jocky. So the cultural and pay gap has reduced

franze 6y ago

>How can a person excel at the technologies required by these firms from my fintech experience with the financial departments there ... excel in Excel. it's a whole programming-parallel-world

mraza007 6y ago
Couldn't agree more, I have met people doing entire risk modelling in excel. It's a pretty powerful tool but nowadays everyone in financial world in emphasizing on the importance Python and Pandas. Even Non Technical people in financial industries are encouraged to learn Python for instance departments like Audit and etc
whatok 6y ago
For HFT? Absolutely not. For trading? The original poster needs to clarify what they mean by "trading" as this is probably still the case for most tech-driven prop trading firms.
- mraza007 6y ago
  Yup mostly tech driven trading shops use technology that’s why they have competitive edge compared to banks
- AllanHoustonSt 6y ago
  You’d be surprised at how many traders and QRs in HFT (or at least in OMM) often reach for Excel. Granted this is way more common among older people in the industry. And as a technologist OP wouldn’t have to worry about writing or maintaining Excel scripts :p
  - whatok 6y ago
    Excel is a very effective tool for many things but suggesting that it would be useful to spend time learning Excel to prepare for HFT is really bad advice.
carlsborg 6y ago

cheezebubba 6y ago

Well you can take a look at their job openings pages: https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/ https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/ Looks like c++, python, and linux sysadmin stuff.

mraza007 6y ago
Do you work at HRT. just curious

necrotic_comp 6y ago

DevOps - standard tools, depends on the firm Trading Systems - C++, networking, memory management. * I work at a HFT firm building algos for clients

mraza007 6y ago
Nice building algo requires heavy math knowledge correct me if I’m wrong Most firms look for masters or Phds for that type of role
- logicchains 6y ago
  "Building algos for clients" may refer to implementing the algos designed by traders/quants.

kasey_junk 6y ago

HFT and Trading firms are largely like any other firms. They have job postings and the skillset they expect is largely what you’d expect. https://www.virtu.com/careers/ https://www.virtu.com/careers/ has a devops role listed within the first 10 results on their careers page. It looks like basically any other modern ops job sheet. Here is one for DRW https://drw.com/careers/job/1280794 https://drw.com/careers/job/1280794 again, not much different than any other firm. Most software written at trading firms is the same as software written anywhere else. The only real differences are on the actual tick to trade path, where you will see the need for FPGA/ASIC programming, very low level network programming and C/C++ systems programming or on the Quant side which can vary widely but typically involves showing PHD level research skills in some hard math/science.

pmart123 6y ago

I used to work in HFT, but haven’t for five years. For core developers, there’s heavy use of C/C++ with a deep understanding of low level programming. On the trade strategy development side, it’s usually some combination of a columnar database, Python/R along with rewriting performance sensitive areas in a lower level language. I won’t be surprised if there was an uptick in the usage of GO the last few years as well.

morelandjs 6y ago

Suppose you have top notch data science and machine learning chops and also suppose quant shops are willing to hire you regardless of your financial domain expertise. In such a scenario, is the 99th percentile of quant compensation significantly higher than the 99th percentile of tech company compensation (FANG etc)? I've always considered this a fork in the road for many---finance versus say advertising--and I'm curious how others with more experience would describe the pros and cons of each.

rubidium 6y ago
If you want to pursue money, then yes both are your best options. Not really a significant difference, you’re just a cog in some billionaires machine extracting your soul for $$$. Avoid both and Choose to make a difference in people’s lives.
- xwdv 6y ago
  It is very difficult to make a positive difference in anyone’s life with his given skills. The best he can do is not actively make anyone else’s life worse, so go with finance, and adopt a shelter animal.
  - jghn 6y ago
    There are plenty of opportunities for people with their skill set in the realm of biomedical research.
  - superhuzza 6y ago
    >It is very difficult to make a positive difference in anyone’s life with his given skills. Based on what? Anecdotal, but my partner is a data scientist and statistician full-time . She regularly volunteers or contracts her skillset to a range of projects, including medical research and criminal justice. It's very impactful work - some of the research will massively improve people's lives. And there is definitely enough work to mostly focus on those projects if someone wants to.

idohft 6y ago

Agreed with the rest, you should just look at job descriptions. Different firms use different technologies, but a devops person will probably be building tooling for monitoring live trading, or GUIs for themselves and traders. These tend to not be as performance-sensitive. If you want to work on the trading systems, you should be good OS-level and network-level things. And you should probably know C/C++. I think some firms might still use Java. Good firms have probably been around for a couple of years, so it's unlikely that they'll use the cool new languages of the day.

xwdv 6y ago
Cool new languages don’t provide any competitive advantage. You will not be doing HFT with Rust or Haskell or whatever.
- emidln 6y ago
  That's not true. Source: I work at an HFT. Rust is very interesting for Greenfield work. The major down side is millions of lines of legacy C++, the more useful already using C++17 or C++2a, which typically provides a lot of what you'd get out of Rust's stdlib and ecosystem but already packaged and integrated. When you choose Rust at an HFT you have to worry about integration with codegen tools (generating efficient Java/C++/$HDL and reasonable throughput Python for protocol definitions is table stakes at any HFT I've heard of) and build pipelines (which might already have distributed building/caching infrastructures and fancy packaging/deployment. Rust has some benefits (and still integrates reasonably well at the ABI level), but modern C++ compilers are no slouches. Rust provides a friendly dev experience, which is a valuable thing, but a lot of the ecosystem advantages are old hat at companies with mature codebases.
  - mraza007 6y ago
    I think Jane Street is using OCaml I’m not sure why did they decided to go with functional programming even though most popular firms are still using C/C++ Do you think using functional programming might have advantage over these programming languages Just curious to find out

pjmlp 6y ago

Basically Java, .NET and C++, with heavy focus on C++. Being able to write allocation free algorithms, even on GC languages, lock free data structures and good knowledge of all multi-core programming paradigms and distributed computing. Here are some talks that will give you a small overview into that world, CppCon 2017: Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM Core C++ 2019 :: Nimrod Sapir :: High Frequency Trading and Ultra Low Latency development techniques https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aU8S-hFQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aU8S-hFQI Open source Java HFT code from Chronicle Software, https://github.com/OpenHFT https://github.com/OpenHFT "Writing and Testing High-Frequency Trading Engines", from Cliff Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iINk7x44MmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iINk7x44MmM However in these domains every ms counts, even how long cables are, so also expect Verilog, VHDL, and plenty of custom made algorithms running directly on hardware. "A Low-Latency Library in FPGA Hardware for High-Frequency Trading" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFcM1pGOIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFcM1pGOIE You can get an overview of the typical expectations here, https://www.efinancialcareers.com/ https://www.efinancialcareers.com/

willcipriano 6y ago
> allocation free algorithms Do you have any good sources for information about this concept? I'm having trouble understanding how a algorithm could produce useful work without allocating anything.
- aliceryhl 6y ago
  An algorithm might be: Take an array of integers as input and return their sum. Returning or adding integers does not require allocating memory.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I presume you mean allocating new memory. You could sum an array and keep track of state/store cumulative sum in the existing array i.e. in-place algorithmic approaches: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-place_algorithm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-place_algorithm You still have to have memory and use it though, somewhere.

talolard 6y ago

I used to work for a firm that did FIX parsers for hft. FIX is the standard protocol for financial data. Company’s claim to fame was the fastest parser on standard hardware as opposed to an FPGA and handling the many many dialects of FIX. A lot of work and skill went to memory layout (minimize cache missed), lock free data structures and spending time in perf looking for ways to shave microseconds off a function. God knows how I got the job, I was super junior , but that’s the kind of work we did and presumably what other companies would want you competent with

throwfin11 6y ago
HFT firms would likely use the exchange binary protocols where available over FIX. Ie: OUCH/ITCH, Pillar etc. With that said, FIX is still relevant on many exchanges and in wide use by the broker/dealers etc...

unixhero 6y ago

Nobody has mentioned the K language and Q language; and the Kdb+ product from KX Systems. I know many institutions and HFT's use the K Database. It's fast because it crunches data in the CPU cache which is insanely fast. Reference: https://code.kx.com/ https://code.kx.com/

throwfin11 6y ago
kdb+ would be used for analysis or slower signal generation. it's not low latency for trading applications.

jdub 6y ago

Whatever skills they put on the job description along with no scruples or moral standards whatsoever.

Unklejoe 6y ago

They usually ask for C/C++, but what they really mean is C++.

ryanianian 6y ago
Not just "C++" but usually they want C++ experience that is very relevant to precisely what the hiring manager wants. Maybe I'm sour-grapes, but I got pretty far through a HFT loop only to get turned away because I didn't have any experience with the particular boost library they were using. (A library that will be mostly obsolete by C++20) They said that this was common in the industry.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >because I didn't have any experience with the particular boost library they were using. (A library that will be mostly obsolete by C++20) Brave of you to assume they'd be able to use C++20. Unfortunately HFTs are just as susceptible to "stuck on an ancient version of GCC" as any other C++ shop, so maybe you dodged a bullet there.

Jhsto 6y ago

From the anecdotal experience of developing such software as a side-project for myself, the hardest parts technically were dealing with concurrency and race conditions caused by it. Other skills for prosperity is understanding statistical significance and randomness. Also, writing reliable software and designing both the best-case and worst-case scenarios is required when interfacing with remote systems: brokers return error or exception cases saying you were too slow all the time, which means your software is dependant on that information and must run in probabilistic state conditions while waiting for the answers to remain performant.

fareesh 6y ago
When dealing with race-conditions, is the skill required just the ability to identify candidates where the race-condition will occur and then apply the relevant locking features around the mutations? What are the implications of identifying a scenario where there is no race condition? Does it just result in a performance hit?
- Jhsto 6y ago
  In my case, I still have unexplainable race conditions in my software, so take it with a grain of salt. But yes, identification and understanding both the locking and synchronization are hard. I don't think there are many other definitive solutions than modeling your software in a predicate language like TLA+ or Alloy, especially once your software grows hence its possible states diverge. > What are the implications of identifying a scenario where there is no race condition? No race condition? Great. It's totally possible there are some not-so-concurrent parts of your software that can run in what I deem a performant manner. > Does it just result in a performance hit? It's much more than that. A bug I have is very serious and it goes something like this: you set a limit order to buy X shares. The limit order gets a partial fulfillment, and you immediately set stop losses and take profits for X shares. However, the limit order gets complete fulfillment before the two other requests are done. If you now try to update the previous orders, for example, it might be that the update call gets registered at the broker first, but the creation gets there last, which means you have bought X+Y shares, but you have stop losses and take profits for only the X. You might now completely lose Y unless you monitor the software all the time. Things like these might happen everywhere, and the real trouble starts when these instances with plausible race conditions of their own start communicating with other parts which might also have race conditions. And the requirement for the concurrency is not only a performance: you might want to collect data in thread N, while you have different strategies of amount M, which all by default subscribe to N, but only selectively when they are doing their strategies. In such a sense, I don't think that doing even a semi-serious trading software without concurrency is possible.

notinventedhear 6y ago

From 4 years in a large public quant house (not HFT): everything upstream of trade execution is Python with very heavy use of numpy, scipy and pandas. This has pros and cons, on balance I'd prefer a better type system, but that everyone in the org can share code has tremendous value at scale. Briefly, the faster your execution the faster everything else needs to be. Java should be fast enough for almost anything short of HFT + colocation which is super expensive infra wise. The skills are not different from other backend roles, but you will need to exercise more math with emphasis time series and stats.

hft09876 6y ago

I've worked at two of what are broadly considered to be the top firms. Most of these comments are inconsistent with my experience. Everybody's talking about what it takes to write trading systems, but OP asked about "skills required to land a job" not skills needed to do the job. Aside from a few specialized roles (like FPGA dev or security), the firms I'm familiar with only evaluate general dev skills. The interview process is pretty much the same as you'd experience at a top tech company. They don't care at all if you know the languages they use. Once you're in the door, the firm will teach you everything you need to know.

derivativethrow 6y ago
Which firms are broadly considered to the top ones?
- PEJOE 6y ago
  Jane Street is one
- nwsm 6y ago
  Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies possibly. Jane Street like the other reply mentioned
  - mraza007 6y ago
    What about Bridge water and Hudson river trading
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      Bridgewater is not an HFT, they are a hedge fund. That being said - Bridgewater are looking for more than just skills. Bridgewater is very heavy on meetings and those meetings being recorded. You can ace the skillset, but would be completely inadequate. Their interview process is great. It's very honest and revealing. I don't fit the company and I made the decision at their campus interview, their opinion matched mine as well. But, unlike most other companies, you are shown exactly what the company is. Which is very good. If you can land an interview, you like them and get an offer - I hear that it's a pretty good place to work.

_asummers 6y ago

Trading firms have many positions available other than the HFT algorithms. There are teams that support those to enable desks (read: startups) to get off the ground quickly (like YC!), analysis teams for doing research for future strategies, accounting, shared service teams, as well as governance teams like risk, compliance, treasury. Depending on the team you're on, your job may be drastically different. I find myself in a role focusing on devops, developer tooling, and team automation, but others on my team focus on data ingestion, financial models on top of the data, UI development for end users. If you're a skilled programmer, there will be a role for you in a sufficiently large firm.

pclmulqdq 6y ago

I can only speak to HFT. For dev roles, Python experts (emphasis on expert) and experts in modern C++ have the easiest time. C experts and systems programmers with assembly expertise can also find a job, but the market is smaller for them (although higher-paying). OS-level and systems programming are valuable. Understanding computer architecture is important, and computer systems as well. Credentials are an important filtering mechanism for them, so if you didn't go to a top 10 school, your resume needs to make up for it (or you need to be a very experienced hire). Working at a FAANG company or a bank doesn't necessarily make up for not going to a top school. Successful devs at HFTs usually have a ~50-hour workweek or are very efficient programmers.

mraza007 6y ago
I wonder How can someone become an expert at python. Even though i have worked for two global banks as an intern but now I’m exploring to land a position in HFT to gain more financial/tech experience to become more well rounded person
- efxhoy 6y ago
  I've written python for a living everyday for a few years now. No means an expert but IMO there are two core skills: Cleanliness and design. Learning and using language features that make code easier to build on, test, and deduce about. Basically writing code that's very nice to humans. Here python really shines. The second part is writing code that's very nice to machines and runs really fast and correctly. Multiprocessing, writing parts of the code in a compiled language for extra speed, using buffers for speed, async, that kind of thing. Easy enough for specific problems, the issue is that these performance tweaks often make code harder for humans to understand. Now writing a nice looking and well designed program is fairly easy. Making a really fast-but-ugly program is also fairly easy. The mark of a real expert in my opinion is combining these two abilities: writing code that's both human and machine friendly. As always, practice makes perfect. To practice you need to practice both, and on real data. Don't just use toy examples, get your hands on some big messy data that takes hours to crunch. Don't just write toy apps, keep writing and adding features until it becomes a huge stinking mess, then learn from that mess and do it again.

emidln 6y ago

The three biggest skills aren't directly tech: learning fast/efficiently, communication and execution under pressure, and perseverance/discipline to finish/deliver. Where I work, our devops use a mix of python/ruby/golang/bash for day to day debugging and development. Ability to read, understand, and modify Python (or a similar scripting language) and a familiarity with Bourne/bash are probably the minimum for devops. For operations, you'd want to bring some skills that add to the team in new skills or redundancy. You'll likely be trained/cross trained in many more. Familiarity with and ability to debug some of the following: databases, networked services (sometimes a pcap replay is all you have), systems troubleshooting, monitoring, queues, or specific hardware and software platforms we use. At the HFT I work at, we hire Jr and Sr people. For systems people, there is a bit of a divide between trading systems engineers, who work directly with devs and traders on the care+feeding of some corner of our software stack and infrastructure systems that provide shared tooling and substrates (k8s, deployment tooling, continuous integration/delivery, configuration management tooling, additional debugging help, etc). We also have network teams, traditional IT service desk teams, and performance monitoring/improvement teams. If you're not coming from trading, we still need all of the standard sysadmin and devops skills. We have SSH, Kafka, Zookeeper, MySQL/Maria, tcpdump/wireshark, Linux, Puppet, Docker, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, Hadoop, etc. We have misc custom file formats but also loads of json , some xml, etc. We integrate open source and proprietary as much or more than we build. Outside of the execution stack, you'd recognize a lot of what we do at any medium-sized tech company. If you want to talk about life at an HFT, my email is in profile. I came into HFT as an experienced hire from the startup world and currently do builds development.

mraza007 6y ago
Hey thanks for sharing I’ll send you an email and i would love to know more about HFTs since I’m currently an undergrad working for a financial company as intern at the moment and graduating soon On the side I’m exploring different career options and one of my top choices is to learn more about HFTs

mattbl 6y ago

Here's a nice (old) blog of someone in the industry: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

andrew-nguyen 6y ago

Besides searching on Glassdoor or Indeed, how can someone find a list of companies that are doing this type of work? Are they limited to the east coast? I'm not very familiar with the HFT industry, but the skills that they require (C++, computer architecture, OS, networking, & performance) are ones that I'm interested in and would love to deepen my experience with. Are there companies on the west coast (more specifically southern California) where one could develop this experience?

mark-r 6y ago
They'll probably be located close to an exchange so that they can colo the servers, but not all exchanges are on the east coast.
lalalal123 6y ago
They're actually mostly in Chicago! You can google proprietary trading.

madballster 6y ago

Not exactly known for HFT, but Man AHL use their own library arctic with Python/Pandas and MongoDB. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyIxdxsyok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyIxdxsyok - The presentation touches on performance considerations.

throwfin11 6y ago

HFT firms use all sorts of technologies. But to be clear, you want to be closest to trading - that's where the big money is; so either a) idea generation (quant work) or b) execution (dev work) For the execution piece, C++ would be the most viable option. On the quant/research piece, python/R/kdb are common tools used, but the real skills are the statistics/math and market knowledge.

brianolson 6y ago

Moral flexibility and subjugation. The boss says to build a thing, you build the thing. If rewriting an infiniband driver and pinning it to a core on the server and processing requests in kernel space in exquisitely crafted C is what cuts reation time by 0.0000005 sec and makes the firm a few extra bucks, that's what you do. I interviewed at a Manhattan HFT firm (~2015) and that's what they do. The boss noted that "Congress could make a law invalidating our business model" and I realized that would be a good idea. They're not making the world a better place; they're not providing a valuable service; they're just exploiting and extracting and skimming some dollars out of the market. They have money and they're in the right place so their money can grab more money.

ensignavenger 6y ago
What about re-writing and infiniband driver requires moral flexibility?
- znpy 6y ago
  the goal behind the rewrite
  - jolmg 6y ago
    Cutting reaction time to make a few extra bucks? How does that require moral flexibility? Is the immoral part that they can use their money to make more money? If by earning more money, one can afford to buy more food in bulk and save money on that and gas, or buy a washing machine and save money on going to the laundromat, is that immoral of one to do?
    - PascLeRasc 6y ago
      Is that what hedge fund people do with their money, buy their first washing machine? Or are they buying apartments and leaving them empty to store their money?
      - 6y ago

andersonvaz 6y ago

Worth to mention is the https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/ https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/ A High Performance Inter-Thread Messaging Library used for HFT.

lalalal123 6y ago

I worked at one of the top tier prop shops in Chicago. This is my experience there: Fresh grad devs are generally evaluated on their potential and not what languages and specific skills they know. The people they end up hiring for fresh grad dev roles tended to come from the same six schools. Said schools are generally not top tier (for developers) and are local to Chicago.

mraza007 6y ago
Compared to New York, I think you'll find out more trading jobs in Chicago.

organicfigs 6y ago

I passed the interviews at one of the top stat arb hft firms and it sounds like there are a couple of responses from similar shops here. One thing people haven't mentioned: pedigree. I passed 3 rounds of interviews and my final interviewer was batting for me, when I didn't get the offer, he said the team was apprehensive because I didn't have the pedigree from MIT/Princeton like everyone else. He wasn't a fan of the decision because he worked at a string of failed startups himself prior to starting there, c'est la vie. Also for the curious, he said the salary range was 400-460k with ~3-5 yoe.

keredson 6y ago
this. i was involved in a lot of interviewing / hiring at one of the top quant firms. i was shocked at how much this factored in.
mraza007 6y ago
Why does going to good school really matter if you are bringing in top notch skills I think that's one the reason why financial companies are having a hard time retaining good tech talent but they pay really well compared to FAANG
rokobobo 6y ago
A hiring partner at an HFT firm once told me why they had a disproportionate number of people from MIT or Ivy League schools, especially for fresh grads: they selected for intelligence, coding skills etc., but they also needed people who could very quickly focus on the top priority tasks for the firm. (For example, if someone committed buggy code and the firm was losing out on profits because its algorithms weren't running, do you hunt down the bug or do you revert?) And it turns out that kids from Ivy League schools tend to be very good at constantly being aware of these top-level priorities for the firm. This applied for almost every front and mid office role in that firm: DevOps, algorithm developers, traders, researchers. I can't speak for all the firms out there, but I think at least my friend would happily substitute pedigree for another item on a person's resume that demonstrated experience with running a live system where downtime is very costly.

dilandau 6y ago

C++ was big. Comfortable navigating a very large and complex codebase, being able to understand complex rules-based systems, and of course knowledge of equities and financial markets. But they'll teach you everything you need to know as long as you can pass the interview.

szczepano 6y ago

for currencies / commodities zmq/java - lmax then there is forex c++ mt4 metaquotes more hardcore like cheetah-solutions fpga / hdl don't know about asic some insides but now inactive https://mdavey.wordpress.com/ https://mdavey.wordpress.com/ there are also options / stocks and cryptocurrencies