Most of the quantitative systems we have do not actually place trades. Instead they provide data to the fund managers or traders and they make the final decision on placing a trade.
It's hard to say if the roles are equivalent. Role responsibilities and structure vary from company to company, even for something that's named the same. The typical trade team structure is something like 1 desk manager, 2-3 traders, and 3-5 analysts. Usually the desk programmer is not from IT, but rather one of the analysts that knows how to code scripts, Python etc. Their scripts are usually some part of the quantitative analysis process, mostly on current or targeted data.
They also use systems developed by IT. The IT systems are bigger and span multiple trade teams. These systems rely more on historical data or market patterns. An example would be a system used by all equity trade desks to identify potential sources of alpha using big data.
So the desk programmer is really more quantitative since they are an analyst whereas the engineers working on the alpha system rely more on input from analysts on what algorithms to implement.
One other thing to mention is that desk operations is a separate type of role that is more like a better version of help desk support.
This is just how my company is structured. I'm sure others are different.
At my company the main tech they use is AWS, Python, R, and various homegrown and vendor financial software (like BlackRock Aladdin). They also use some excel, Tableau, and stuff like that for reports.
You have to be a quick learner, but I wouldn't say you need to be super smart. If you are super smart, then you will be more likely to be successful. You basically have to be competent in two domains - technology and finance. At least in my company, you would work closely with the actual quants (we call them analysts) and they can give you feedback and direction on your work. This type of work is usually for larger projects and permanent systems. This is more software dev and less finance.
We also have a role called something like trade desk programmer. These are typically business people with a background in trading/analysis that learn enough Python, scripting, R, and excel macros to be able to write small scripts or programs to do some sort of analysis or filtering as part of their trading activity. Each trading team would probably have 1 out of 5-10 people in that role. This type of work is smaller projects that are usually temporary or change often. This is more finance and less software dev. Hours are usually something like 7am to 5pm.