alt Hacker NewsI was what was called "Trade Desk".
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)
Replies
May I know if someone with no trading knowledge can get into this field? Or do new hires that you've seen generally have some background knowledge on related to trading, etc.?
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.
Thanks for all the info!
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...)