What's it Like to Be a Software Engineer at a Trading Firm?

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a software engineer at a trading firm – which is totally understandable as they pay through the roof – read on! 

 

We'll cover:

1. What does a typical day look like?
2. What are the hours like?
3. What are some projects that graduate engineers work on at trading firms?
4. What's different about working as a software engineer in trading vs in other fields?
5. What are the different software engineering roles?
6. What are the learning & development opportunities like at a trading firm?
7. What's the downside of working as a software engineer in trading?
8. Are there opportunities to work globally?
9. What next?

What does a typical day look like?

For the most part, you'll be doing much of the same work as you'd do as a software engineer at any company. You'll write code, fix bugs, test things, and work with stakeholders (in this case, traders) to figure out their needs and make sure you meet them.

Developer working with trader. Photo courtesy of Options Strategy Development Lead @ IMC Trading

📣 Hear from a grad

Most of my day is then spent writing and reviewing code. 

When I get assigned a new task, I first make sure I understand the requirements. This will often involve collaborating with traders to understand how they are planning on using a new feature or what issues they are having with the current set up. Then I will spend some time writing and testing the code. Once I am done, my colleagues have the chance to review the code and make sure I haven’t missed anything important. ...

Once my colleagues and I are happy with the changes, I ask a trader to try them out and make sure they work as expected, before releasing them to our production systems. – Graduate Software Developer @ IMC Trading

You might start with morning meetings or with a review of any code that was deployed the previous night.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

There is no typical workday at IMC because every day is different! Usually, my workday starts with coming into work, eating breakfast and attending morning meetings where we share what we're working on and plan what's coming next.

There's always lots of things going on, so the rest of the day involves a mixture of chatting to people to understand how to solve the next problem we have, doing some implementation work to solve the current problem, and following-up on older items that are hitting production to make sure that what we delivered had the intended effect and is working properly.

There's also a lot of knowledge sharing sessions, lunches, cakes, and break time to unwind and get a game of table tennis or foosball in.  – Software Engineer @ IMC Trading

[8:20 AM] Once I arrive at the office, I ensure that all the applications I deployed last night are working ... If there are any bugs, I work on a fix before the markets open. ... Today everything is working (relief) so I go through the logs and make sure there are no critical alerts that should worry me. – Graduate Trading Software Developer @ Susquehanna International Group (SIG)

Your day-to-day schedule may depend on the schedule of the traders you work with. For example, here's a developer who switches between working with traders in Hong Kong and Australia.

📣 Hear from a grad

After lunch, ... I usually choose to work on tasks that involve collaboration with some of the Hong Kong team as they have officially settled into their working day. ... [4:30 PM] as the Australian market has closed, if needed, I'll try to catch any of the traders to help with testing in-progress automation or updating them on any new changes to logic that impact them. – Graduate Software Developer @ Eclipse Trading

What are the hours like?

Tellingly, we only found one complaint about long hours from a software engineer in our collection of anonymous reviews. This is most likely because engineers at trading firms work fairly regular hours compared to their counterparts in trading and research. 

📣 Hear from a grad

I have arrived in the office by 9 and start off my work day by checking my emails ... [6:00 PM] After work, I enjoy playing badminton or a game of table tennis with my coworkers. – Graduate Software Developer @ Eclipse Trading

And like traders, you won't work weekends.

📣 Hear from a grad

I have never had to work on weekends. – Software Engineer @ IMC Trading

What are some projects that graduate engineers work on at trading firms?

Photo courtesy of Graduate Software Developer @ Eclipse

As a software engineer at a trading firm, you'll generally be responsible for building and maintaining the tools and systems that help the firm run smoothly. These include:

• Valuation Tools: You might be involved in developing, testing, and maintaining software that calculates the value of financial products. This software will also take into consideration various other market factors, in real time.
• Auto traders: These are automated systems that can execute large volumes of trades within fractions of a second. You'll use a range of tools, including algorithms and predictive analytics, to create these high-speed trading platforms.
• Security Measures: This is paramount in all areas of software engineering, but particularly in a sector where huge amounts of money are involved. You'll be tasked with implementing robust security measures to keep client data and transactions secure.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

At the moment, I'm spending most of my time working on a way for us to accelerate the path that some information takes from one part of our trading system to another part. Whilst doing this I get to dive into some deep coding sessions, co-ordinate rollout and network changes with our system engineers, and verify the behaviour and intentions with our traders.    – Software Engineer @ IMC Trading

I’m currently working on the internal alert manager – an application with client and server architecture that enables users to view and acknowledge alerts sent by different applications running in-house. Due to the nature of large volume of data flowing through the SIG office every day, alert manager is responsible for handling high volume of live data without affecting the application performance. It’s the first time that I have had to actually think about software scalability and have had to conduct a lot research and experiments to get it right. It’s been a great opportunity for me to learn about software architecture design. – Graduate Trading Software Developer @ Susquehanna International Group (SIG)

One project that I’ve been working on is the rookie environment. In this project, I worked with a team to upgrade the stack that we train the rookie traders on, including the exchange simulator, so that it would better mirror production. – Graduate Software Engineer @ Optiver

The biggest project that the Compliance IT team is working on is an improvement to our Market Surveillance system. This system analyses our trading activity for any suspicious behaviour that could manipulate the market or breach exchange rules and reports any incidents to the Compliance team. – Graduate Software Developer – Compliance IT @ Optiver

What's different about working as a software engineer in trading vs in other fields?

Grads mention the scope of their work as something unique about working as a software developer in trading.

📣 Hear from a grad

[T]here are very few places in the world where you’ll get to work on ultra-low-level code or manage a machine learning cluster, let alone be able to do both, at the level of a graduate or intern. – Graduate Software Developer – Delta 1 @ Optiver

A frustration of working on tech products is that you don't get much feedback from users. You spend months developing something and you release it and ... crickets. With trading, grads say the feedback is much more immediate. This can be a plus and a minus. Here's the plus side.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

IMC has given me the tools and resources to design the solution from beginning to end, which is really satisfying and empowering. As we are a technology-driven trading firm, the relationship between the quality of your work and the success of our business is really direct and clear (the markets give us feedback on whether we're doing well), which is not the case for a lot of other software engineering roles.  – Software Engineer @ IMC Trading

Optiver has a very fast feedback loop because our “clients” are [traders] either sitting next to us or just downstairs from us. This means it’s super easy to see the tangible impacts that you’re having, which I find really gratifying. – Graduate Software Developer – Delta 1 @ Optiver

And here's the minus side.

📣 Hear from a grad

There is also quite a lot of responsibility – bugs and errors in code can cause trading problems that can not only just lose the firm money but also potentially cause compliance issues. – Software Engineer @ Citadel Securities

Compared to a tech company, your career progression won't be as straightforward:

📣 Hear from a grad

Citadel Securities has no explicit career ladder in the traditional tech company sense. It’s common for larger tech firms to have a series of explicit levels and criteria for the promotion. Citadel is much smaller and far more team-based, so the things that a career ladder facilitates (increased technical depth, more ownership over products) don’t naturally come as a result of a yearly promotion process, but is something to be actively managed by each individual developer. – Software Engineer @ Citadel Securities

Software development will also be done in smaller teams:

📣 Hear from a grad

This is one of the areas we differ to many technology companies. Because of the large volume of components in our system, we work in small units, and most applications will have only 2-3 Developers working on them. – Software Developer @ Optiver

But on the plus side, you'll get an up-close look at global financial systems. 

📣 Hear from a grad

The thing that I find most interesting about my job is the window it gives me into the inner workings of global financial markets. There are very few places in the world where you can get a full, hands-on understanding of how the world’s stock exchanges and capital markets function and learn from experienced individuals who have been working in this space for their entire careers. – Software Engineer @ Citadel Securities

What are the different software engineering roles?

Because of the key role that software plays in trading, there are a wide variety of roles in software. A key distinction to note is "core" vs "market-facing".

📣 Hear from a grad

The Delta 1 team is what some people informally call a core team. This means that we work on a product or set of products that work across markets, and focus on making that scale, so we can develop one Autotrader, but trade many products and markets. This is opposed to our market-facing squads, which focus on a few markets and take care to make sure our products adjust to the specific quirks of each market.  – Graduate Software Developer – Delta 1 @ Optiver

Like at big tech companies, there will also be platform engineers, who develop tools to support the work of other software engineers at the firm. Here's a platform engineer who shares what they do.

📣 Hear from a grad

My team and I have recently rolled out a new control system for managing applications in our environment that includes both a web interface as well as a command-line one. ... I’ve also been working on streamlining our build and deployment process such that developers can spend less time waiting for their changes to be released into production. – Platform Engineer @ Optiver

What are the learning & development opportunities like at a trading firm?

Grads generally find that they learn a lot from the variety of their work.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

I’ve done everything from front end development to configuration management to writing C++ and architecting deployment solutions. – Platform Engineer @ Optiver

At IMC, developers have really broad end-to-end responsibilities across our entire trading system, which means that we learn a lot, very quickly, and we can make a real, significant impact on the business early and often. ... Working on advanced algorithms and technology give you the experience to handle not just trading problems, but many different software engineering challenges.– Software Engineer @ IMC Trading

On Tuesdays and Fridays, it’s time for our stand up team meeting. Every team member will discuss their progress and plan for the remainder of the week. The team meeting provides us with a platform that we can share about new technologies between team members. You can pick up a lot in a team meeting! I’ve learned about specifics like protocol buffers, a method of serializing structured data efficiently, and entity framework ... during the team meetings, as well as larger concepts, like the purpose and variety of our internal applications.  ... My technical skills have grown a lot since leaving University. In school, you work on standalone assignments. Whereas at SIG I am working in a large code base, with complicated requirements, with multiple dependencies in order to solve problems that have direct impact on the business.  – Graduate Trading Software Developer @ Susquehanna International Group (SIG)

In terms of career development –

📣 Hear from a grad

As I’ve become more senior I’ve taken on larger pieces of development work, some deployment, analysis and evaluation, code reviews for colleagues, discussing new projects on the horizon. It depends where we are in the development cycle. The majority of my work is in C++ because it’s so effective from a latency perspective, and a little in Python for some of the data work. – Software Developer @ Optiver

What's the downside of working as a software engineer in trading?

The number one thing engineers brought up was the demanding nature of the work in terms of the high level of responsibility and the fast pace. Here, we've drawn on anonymous reviews, so you get the actual low-down.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

You are given a huge amount of responsibility from the first day and the fast pace means that you need to work really hard (but your efforts are compensated). – Anonymous

High paced work environment can be tiring. – Anonymous

Can be stressful due to high expectations. – Anonymous

There is a lot of expected of you from day 1 and handling a lot of pressure is a normal day-in day-out experience. This can be quite daunting when you first start but leads to accelerated career growth. – Anonymous

This is a very stressful place to work and the company seems to be proud of this. – Anonymous

Are there opportunities to work globally?

Yes, there are definitely opportunities to move around the world if that's what you want.

📣 Hear from a grad

I did some internships and eventually found myself at Citadel Securities London to work with the options desk. I’ve been with the firm for 5 years now and worked in London, Hong Kong before relocating to Australia in 2020. – Software Engineer @ Citadel Securities 

Even from your office in Australia, you'll also get to interact with your coworkers across the world.

📣 Hear from grads themselves

I’m working on a project to migrate solutions to our office in Sydney from our HQ in the US ... I’ve ... been able to partner closely with my counterparts in our US to learn from them and brainstorm solutions. It’s been great to get that international exposure and to work on something that will help to facilitate future application migrations and support. – Graduate Software Developer @ Susquehanna International Group (SIG)

[D]uring a recent Osaka securities exchange upgrade, I was working very closely with the Japan IT team to test our Delta 1 products with the changes that the exchange was made. – Graduate Software Developer – Delta 1 @ Optiver

However, this depends on the firm, so make sure to check. Here's how one anonymous grad put it.

📣 Hear from a grad

There are only a couple of other overseas offices, so not as much choice for travel/relocation.

What next? 

Ready to dive into the world of trading?

1. Learn more about what trading firms actually do and how much they pay.
2. Search for open roles and apply away!