Yo blinders. Currently I am SDE 1 at Amazon. I am interested in HFT companies like HRT/Jump/Optiver etc. I would like to find a software engineering job in these kind of companies located in Asia(Shanghai, HK, Singapore), maybe half year later? I wanna know if I can get an interview chance with my background. BS: non-CS related degree; MS: bioinformatics from one of top Asian universities. Currently 1 YOE, using Java in daily work. Good at data structures and algorithms, familiar with C++ programming. Have done some open source system related course projects, like MIT 6.S081, Stanford CS144 etc. Quite self-motivated in learning, currently reading Linux kernel related books. Thank you for all kind replies. #interview #finance #hft #hudsonrivertrading #jumptrading #towerresearchcapital #optiver #janestreet #shanghai #singapore
Sorry to break it to you, but unless you are really good at developing models for high frequency trading or on an amazon team where these applications are used, you have a low probability.
Thank you for your kind reply!
Models for HFT are for Quant research jobs not for engineering (infra) jobs. If you are good at C++, and also understanding of operating systems, data structures, you stand a good chance
You are interested but are they?
how do I down vote you?
@Morthe, No need to down vote. TCS is still figuring out what to do with his life, frustrated working long hours and getting a $500/Mo TC. It’s understandable @ghaapghip. Have a nice day!
How is it going op ?
Hi, thx for your comment. I consulted some people (≈3) who is currently working at tier 1-2 HFTs, none of them suggest me to go to HFT. And I think it’s quite reasonable. There are basically three reasons. 1. Career path is not clear, in big Tech you can go from L4 to L7, every stage is clear, but in most of HFTs, levels are flatten, most HFT might have 2 levels, junior and senior, salaries within one level does not change very much. If I am persuing a higher TC, going to an unicorn might be better and easier. 2. The project is not as interesting as it looks like. The trading engine is quite complete and matured for most big HFTs, so basically programmers do operations and develop small features on that. Also some other side projects are not attractive for me. Low latency sounds like fantasy but there are so much difference in software level. Most important part is hardware, which I am not interested in. 3. At amazon, I clearly know that my project is helping our customers and developers, I can see the good impact directly. But at HFT, some of my friends thought his job is not benefiting the society, that makes him leave the company and go to a startup focusing on infrastructure like Snowflake. He is feeling better there.
For now, I will spend most of time preparing coding interviews for big tech/unicorns, which is kind of LeetCode and system design. Because I am comfortable with LeetCode (I have ~2200 rating on LeetCode contests), so I’m not quite anxious about that. But I am still learning low level stuffs about system and networking in my spare time only out of interests. I will try to apply some top HFTs to explore the world as well. But they’re not my targets. It’s ok to get rejected by all of them.
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BTW, if the probability is quite low, I will consider to change targets.