Image:
DAVID HOLT ,
CC BY 2.0According to the statistics of the portal Stack Overflow, the field of finance is among the ten most popular among the developers of industries. Today we will talk about what should be expected to professionals who are planning to start a career in financial companies.
Working conditions
Work in finance is definitely different from work in start-ups or large IT corporations. Here is a more traditional approach to the organization of the workflow, rarely when you can find "designer" offices or a lot of entertainment for employees. Often, there is a certain dress code, which may be unusual for developers working in startups.
For example, not so long ago, Business Insider journalists
conducted an analysis of the popularity of financial companies with applicants on LinkedIn and found out that Morgan Stanley, which took the 4th place, attracted many people due to the lack of too strict dress code (in comparison with other banks).
When entering a job at an investment bank, a hedge fund or a brokerage firm, it is also difficult to rely on a design
office with huge play and sports zones, massage rooms, sleep rooms and completely free meals. Most likely some of this will be, but not on such a scale as in the conventional Google.
For example, in the
office of Goldman Sachs there is a gym, and employees can get a discount on its club cards. An interesting fact: economic news is displayed even on the screens of the simulator monitors:
As can be seen, from the point of view of the external attributes of "coolness", work in the field of finance may be inferior to IT startups and large technology companies. Why, then, many developers still come to this area? This is facilitated by the ability to use advanced technology in the work on interesting projects.
What projects can I take part in
The financial market is represented by a wide range of companies: there are stock exchanges, banks, investment funds, brokerage firms and independent software developers (for example, trading robots). Accordingly, developers can participate in a variety of projects from writing trading systems and tools for working with Big Data to building infrastructure using the most advanced hardware.
Using ITI Capital as an example, one can understand what IT specialists face in brokerage companies. We are developing our own trading system Matrix, the
SmartX terminal (read more about the history of this project can be read
here ), develops an API to our infrastructure called
SmartCOM . A separate direction - the creation of mobile applications for online trading.
Interface of the SmartX trading terminalIn the field of finance, speed and maximum productivity are important, so a lot of effort is spent on improving these indicators of the software being created. In the blog, we have repeatedly told about how is, for example, the
optimization of the trading terminal.
Common programming languages
A significant part of the infrastructure of brokerage companies and stock exchanges is created using the C ++ language — it creates a wide variety of products, from libraries for calculating price models of derivative instruments to data stream processing modules. Specialists who know this language are highly demanded. Moreover, the creator of the language Bjarne Stroustrup himself (Bjarne Stroustrup)
works at the investment bank of Morgan Stanley as a technology director.
In addition to C ++, C # and Java are widespread - with their help they often implement certain parts of trading applications or the frontend services of financial companies (for example, the GUI of trading terminals).
Scripting languages like Python, MATLAB and R are also used to describe trading strategies and prototyping models. Script languages that can even be built into trading terminals, such as the
TradeScript language with which trading robots can be written directly, are also popular. inside the SmartX terminal.
A simple TradeScript strategy written in the trading terminal windowIn addition, according
to financial company recruiters surveyed by the Efinancial Careers portal, Python developers are in demand - this language is indispensable for creating analytical tools and quantum models - data processing technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and Scala are also gaining popularity.
What else you need to be able to
Each company has its own requirements, however, it is possible to formulate some trends in this direction. The infrastructure specialists will not have to seriously restructure themselves when moving into the financial sector, but developers may need some specific knowledge.
To get a job in a serious financial company, you need to know perfectly well the PLO and standard algorithms. The development of client-server financial systems also goes hand in hand with multi-threaded programming. Therefore, the specialist should not be afraid of tasks that imply, for example, writing a standard TCP server, a load balancing server and a high performance server.
Systems for the financial sector are based on databases, so developers will need in-depth knowledge of SQL. Knowledge of simple select statements will not be enough - quite often during the work you will have to deal with the creation of storage procedures, deal with indexes, and various types of locks.
Trading systems typically use the UNIX platform (often Linux). For Windows, as a rule, trading terminals with graphical interfaces are created, for developing the “engine” of trading software, they use UNIX. In addition, professionals involved in the development of trading software need to be able to work with
GPU ,
co-processors and modern network cards (for example, Mellanox and Solarflare).
Do not forget about the technological knowledge applicable specifically to the financial sector - before looking for work in a conditional brokerage company, you should understand, for example, data transfer protocols like FIX or, in the case of the Moscow Exchange, ASTS Bridge - in our The blog published a whole series of materials about these technologies (
FIX ,
Fast ,
Plaza II ,
ASTS Bridge ).
Other materials on finance and stock market from ITI Capital :