Algo Software Engineer

At HRT, we program computers to intelligently trade on the stock market. We make the world’s markets more financially efficient using smart algorithms. To get the job done, we hire some of the smartest computer scientists in the world to develop both our low latency trading platform and our massive distributed research platform.

Algo Software Engineers (AE) are programmers that work hand-in-hand with Algo Strategy Developers (AD). Whereas ADs tend to use their math skills to make smarter strategies, AEs focus on the software that powers trading and research. Because of this close collaboration, AEs tend to be the type of engineers that thrive on constant interaction and discussion. Hearing how their most recently deployed system allowed for whole new types of research would make their week. AEs are the type of engineers that don’t mind juggling a few projects at once and have a varied portfolio of project types, from long-term ambitious new systems to fire-fighting live issues.

Our environment is particularly well suited to driven, self-motivated programmers. For one, the company’s Partners are all programmers. Team Leads spend a majority of their time doing technical work. Algo teams run on a very bottom-up approach that encourages everyone on the teams to come up with ideas and dictate the direction of each team together. Finally, there is very little emphasis placed on project management process (almost no meetings and no project managers) and there is a lot of emphasis placed on engineering process such as automated testing, design/code reviews, and technical training.

We are a Linux/Unix shop with a codebase written primarily in C++ and Python. If you are not a C++ or Python or Linux expert, that’s probably OK. We really care more about your technical fundamentals, practical experience and that intense desire to make things better for other people. That being said, we want someone who is familiar with a non-scripting language such as C++ or Java.

Here are a few examples of programmers who are currently AEs at HRT:

• When he’s not solving riddles and dancing salsa, David’s writing distributed computing APIs. He regularly solves bugs like “one out of a million jobs are dying on only these machines and only on Tuesdays”. He likes bridging the gap between Algo Strategy Developers and Systems Engineers to explore how to use distributed computing to run research. He really enjoys coming up with ways to make millions of jobs more efficient.
• Before joining HRT, Jessie worked in big tech for 6 years, doing primarily web development. She enjoys taking unclear problems (“This job takes too long to run.”) and figuring out the right way to solve them (“The reason the speed of this job is concerning is because it’s impractically slow to debug. We need more interactive debugging tools to avoid constantly restarting jobs.”). She cares about writing reliable and thoroughly tested software. When she’s not coding, Jessie enjoys solo traveling (she’s been to every continent except Antarctica!), reading far too many books, and speaking at conferences.
• Aaron started programming at age 5 and previously ran the research team at a music software company, bringing over 7 years of experience to HRT. He cooks and practices partner acrobatics in his free time. He gets joy from his teammates’ happiness when their research runs twice as fast, from building them tools that help them visualize their strategies, and from keeping code organized and maintainable. He's gotten coworkers from other teams involved in latency improvements to his group's live trading. He enjoys the collaborative environment and learning from his coworkers.