I 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)

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...)

You are very welcome!

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

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.

So I wrote up how I ended there: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1663668616233885699?s=20

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

You know how coders are expected to grind out leetcode interviews? For the finance fields, a common interview topic is what you read in “The Journal” (WSJ). So just stay on top of it for a few weeks, see some trends, etc.

I’ve worked in finance for 25 years and never even heard of this coming up in an interview.

Imo it's not out of place in context if one is trying to determine if the candidate has an interest in finance.

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.