Many firms have them and they are a hybrid of:
- DevOps (e.g. we help, or own, deployments to production)
- SRE (e.g. we own the dashboards that monitored trading and would manage outages etc)
- Trading Operations (e.g. we would work with exchanges to set up connections, cancel orders etc)
My background is:
- CompSci/Economics BA
- MBA
- ~20 years of basically doing the above roles. I started supporting an in house Order Management System at a large bank and then went from there.
For more detail, here is my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-elliott-3210352/
I also have a thread about the types of outages you see in this line of work here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1215876962809339904?s=20
(I have a lot of other trading/SRE related threads here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1212223167944478720?s=20)
I'm a front office engineer at a prop firm -- always interesting to get insight into how others do it.
We have fairly similar parallels, maybe with the exception of throwing new exchange connections to the dedicated networking group.
Always love watching their incident responses from afar (usually while getting impacted desks to put away the pitchforks). Great examples of crisis management, effectiveness and prioritization under pressure, ... All while being extremely pragmatic about actual vs perceived risk.
(I'm sure joining KCG in August of 2012 was a wild time...)
It's definitely a job that you don't hear much about but has a lot of interesting positives for people who like technology and trading. Especially if you prefer shorter term, high intensity work vs long term projects (e.g. like developers).
> Always love watching their incident responses from afar
I actually have a thread on that too: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1227335960788160513?s=20
> (I'm sure joining KCG in August of 2012 was a wild time...)
And not surprisingly, a thread on that as well: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1501174282969305093?s=20
I did consider applying for a role in a very similar field, but figured I'll be fighting an uphill battle with no knowledge in trading/stock market/etc.
Now, I'm not disqualifying them if they dont read the journal. But if they can't demonstrate any proactive interest in finance, or tell me about some happenings/events/stories they personally find interesting (theres a ton of interesting stuff happening) its definitely an amber flag.
but that story is not the most efficient way (although I do talk about a better approach at the end).
To summarize:
A LOT of hedge funds hire non finance people for specific roles e.g. cloud, Linux tuning, networking etc
The smarter ones have realized that there are great people everywhere e.g. Gaming company SREs have a lot of relevant experience due to high traffic load, short SLAs and lots of financial risk due to outages. Applying for a role in one of those departments is a lot easier than trying to jump directly into a trading desk/operations role.
Finally, knowing someone on the inside also helps a lot which is made MUCH easier by LinkedIn, Twitter etc
This company's official ethical foundation is "Don't Get Caught."
Or leave things in place, but put a 1 minute transaction freeze during binary events, and fill the order book during that time with no regard for when an order was placed, just random allocation of order fills coming out of the 1 minute pause.
These funds would lose their shit if they had to go back to knowledge being the only edge rather than speed and knowledge.
Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.
If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.
Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.
It might add a bit of color to this conversation.
That was not why. Possibly the cable made a difference (had an open circuit that made the NICs back down to a lower speed; noisy leading to retransmissions) but it wasn't the length per se.
When we're measuring time on the scale of nanoseconds then, yes, cable length is definitely something we care about and will reliably show up in measurements. In some situations, we not only care about the cable length, but also its temperature.
A couple of quants had built a random forest regression model that could take inputs like time of day, exchange, order volume etc and spit out an interval of what latency had historically been in that range.
If the latency moved outside that range, an alert would fire and then I would co-ordinate a response with the a variety of teams e.g. trading, networking, Linux etc
If we excluded changes on our side as the culprit, we would reach out to the exchange and talk to our sales rep there would might also pull in networking etc.
Some exchanges, EUREX comes to mind, were phenomenal at helping us identify issues. e.g. they once swapped out a cable that was a few feet longer than the older cable and that's why the latency increased.
One day, it's IEX, of Flash Boys fame, that triggers an alert. Nothing changed on our side so we call them. We are going back and forth with the networking engineer and then the sales rep says, in almost hushed tones:
"Look, I've worked at other exchange so I get where you are coming from in asking these questions. Problem is, b/c of our founding ethos, we are actually not allowed to track our own internal latency so we really can't help you identify the root cause. I REALLY wish it was different."
I love this story b/c HN, as a technology focused site, often thinks all problems have technical solutions but sometimes it's actually a people or process solution.
Also, incentives and "philosophy of the founders" matter a lot too.