I know Bloomberg has infrastructure team involving no financial knowledge; while other financial application team where engineers could learn tons of finance. As new grad software engineer, I’m super interested in developing future career in financial industry, so any such team to recommend (like portfolio analytics)? And how hard it is to get into such team? Would such team generally be more selective compared with infrastructure team? Thanks
You got it the other way around. Infrastructure teams usually have better engineers and are more selective. Financial apps teams a lot of times need to support a lot of legacy infrastructure and need to do lots of mundane tasks having little to do with engineering. They also have to deal with the goddamn product owners who are the weakest people at Bloomberg. If you are interested in finance though definitely join one of the financial app teams. You are welcome!
You want to get financial knowledge? - go to one of the portfolio Enterprise teams ...PORT, MARS, TOMS, AIM - last two are the oldest and do come with some baggage ..but pretty much all use new tech here and there. MARS Is the newest and is known for giving code interviews even to the internal transfers - so the most picky I guess. The reason why Enterprise is because it is cross asset - you will get exposure to many different aspects of finance. If you go to teams outside of Enterprise they tend to specialize and thus you will get a deeper exposure to one particular asset class or type of analytics. E..g if you join mortgage team you will know a lot about mortgages but not as much about fx or risk in general for example, and not how market players that operate based on trading benchmark their performance against indices ... examples like that. You need to choose - you want depth or you want breadth. Also enterprise teams in general deal with much larger systems - so building large scale performance oriented systems.
Thanks! Great to know portfolio enterprise team is more “general” crossing asset, and builds large-scale system; so it seems like enterprise is good place to both learn distributed system tech as well as learn finance domain knowledge? Also another curiosity is which of these teams are analytics-oriented and data-rich? I’m fan of big data. Thx!
They all do tons of calcs for large amounts of clients so scale wise they are close ..they specialize in a bit different products: PORT does portfolio benchmarking against indices , TOMS - sell side (their clients banks and such), AIM buys side - hedge funds etc , MARS - all sorts of risk data and analysis. Note though, most of Bloomberg uses C++, including these teams, so most of their large systems are built in house. Some years ago AIM gave a talk about them using Apache STORM but that's the only example I heard of .. otherwise everything is built in house.
Thanks! Also, I heard the best tech is at infrastructure org. What’s exactly infrastructure? Guess these Enterprise team (PORT, AIM) don’t belong to infra?
No they don't. Infrastructure are the teams exactly what they are called after - they don't do finance related things .. instead they do reusable systems, frameworks and tools.
There isn’t much you will gain from working on financial apps except that you can add it to your list of products. I worked for 3 huge banks working closely with FO and BO for 8 years . You will get fluent in finance , but there are always users or analysts who tell you exactly what they need. I work on infra now and I learn more about engineering which is actually the field we would like to become experts in.
thx! But maybe I wanna be data scientist or quant in finance field. So I’d like to accumulate finance knowledge and expose to more analytics related environment. Thus maybe finance apps team is better option for me?
Take the CFA certification and get the money back from Bloomberg . When you join a BB financial function Team , you might learn in debt about that specific product like Forex , MUST , commodities . But a CFA certification or those free BU sessions will give you the knowledge you seek. But having finance people around will definitely add knowledge subconsciously , like how having friends who are chefs and you keep hearing food tech jargon from them
Where do trading systems fit into this?
I doubt pure finance teams are difficult to get in. I've basically seen new grad cannon fodder mostly placed in such full-stack teams at Bloomberg. Infrastructure teams require strong backend engineers, and as such, should be more selective on who they pick.
Thx!