Derivatives, Derivatives, Derivatives.

As Mike Biederman's guest article below noted, developers are in great demand in the equity derivatives space.  One of my major investment banking clients is doing some serious hiring in this area, 12 openings to be filled within the next few months.  Ideally, they are looking for 2-5 year Java/C++ and/or C# developers.  While financial system development experience is ideal, if you are a bright, well-educated developer who'd love to work on a top trading floor...please send me your resume.

Overview
This expansion is essentially a technology play: derivatives growth will follow from the capacity and flexibility of our pricing, modeling, market-making, trading, risk management and control systems.

• To provide fast and consistent pricing, quoting and scenario-based risk analysis, we are accelerating development of massively scalable calculation servers.
• To support increasing volumes of issuance and market making and increasingly complicated structured products, we are re-engineering the data architecture behind our booking and distribution systems.
• To trade and risk-manage products which depend on new kinds of market data, we are building tools to manipulate and analyze these data, and frameworks to study them historically.
• To make all this information useful to traders, salespeople and other customers, we are crafting rich GUI clients.
• In all these efforts we are building on a successful ongoing partnership with the respective trading desks and the business unit as a whole.

General Requirements
Candidates should have a keen interest in the modeling, pricing and risk management of equity derivatives. They should have excellent problem-solving skills, including the ability to teach themselves on the job. They should have good presentation and communication skills as all of the positions require much client interaction, and good teamwork skills as collaborative efforts are the rule. They should also be adept at setting and resetting their priorities throughout the course of a typically busy day. Technically, expertise in one of C++, C# and Java is required and knowledge of a second of these is strongly preferred; candidates will demonstrate their language expertise in both a written test and a technical interview. Two to four years of relevant work experience is ideal. Knowledge of derivatives is a plus, as is knowledge of Perl.

Range of Experience
We are looking to higher people across a broad range, from recent graduates through to senior VP level.

Specific Roles

GUI Developer
C# a requirement, as development is primarily in .NET. Joins a unified team building user interfaces for risk management, data analysis, derivatives pricing and trading. The team's challenge is to design components that can be combined flexibly for these very different purposes and provide a responsive interface to service oriented architecture.

Server-side Developer
Strong C++ a requirement. Joins a team architecting and building our pricing and risk management servers. In addition to the obvious challenges of efficiency, scalability, robustness, we need to design systems that can change over time in response to changing demands without becoming unmanageable.

Database/Distributed Developer
Strong DB skills (Sybase, DB2) required, preferably including optimization and datawarehousing. Experience in one OO language (C#, Java, C++) required as role will stretch to application development. Joins a team maintaining the division*s credit risk, market risk, collateral management and customer valuation systems. The challenge is maintaining the integrity and flexibility of the division's critical risk warehouses whilst catering to a wide range of front, middle and back office clients injecting a steady stream of new requirements. Excellent opportunity to acquire or build on broad equity product and processing knowledge.

Quantitative Developer
Strong C++ a requirement, as is knowledge of partial differential equations and numerical analysis. Joins a team maintaining the division's core analytics across both applications and trading desks. The work is a challenging mixture of self-contained fixes, subtle enhancements to production systems, and open-ended design problems. The successful candidate will have a sharp eye for detail and an ongoing commitment to testing.