Miles from the Curb

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.

Where've you been all my (professional) life?

Alright, I'll admit it.  I just started using linked-in.  I had read about this networking software through the ERE and just starting using it recently.  In a word: Wow.  This is the perfect recruiting tool and it's taken me 3.5 years in professional recruiting start putting it to use. 

For those of you who are not familiar with it, LinkedIn is an online social networking tool.  Basically, you put your profile out there and network with other people whom you have similar interests with.  The cool part is that they have a google-esque search engine feature which lets you search on specific parameters.  However, in order to actually get in touch with people outside of your direct network, you need to have some sort of connection with them.  It's kind of like that Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon movie game where you can link any actor to any other actor through Kevin Bacon because he's been in 50000 movies.  Same deal here, the bigger the network the easier it is to connect with the people you're looking for.

I've seen tremendous results in less than a week.  Here's how I made it work for me:

First step was putting out a profile showing that I'm an IT recruiter who does permanent placements in the Wall Street community.  From there, I just sent an invitation out to the best clients and candidates I know asking them to join my network.  It snowballed from there.  By emailing my hotlist, I now have 43 people in my direct network (and rapidly expanding).  I can now also contact everyone in their direct network which adds up to 4,100 people.  Go one degree further and I have 485,000 in my network.  Just keed in mind you can only access people within 2 degrees of you without having to pay a small fee to contact them.  But, if you make your network big enough you should have enough connections to get to the people you want.   
                                                                                       
To put this in more practical terms, I have had a number of junior level java development roles come up with two of my investment bank clients in NYC.   Utilizing linked-in's search on java developers in the 10014 area code,  it will bring up the profiles of all java developers in the NYC area within my network.  That's well over 1,000 java developers.  I have to imagine there are some good ones in there. 

In a sense, I've basically combined my hotlist of the best people I know with their network of the best people they know.  I now have access to an absurd amount of people in my industry, a good number of whom are probably top-shelf talent.  You know what they say, good people know good people.

Wanna join my network?  Just send me a note. 
 

A message from Mike Biedermann

Hi All,

While the stock markets have been up and down this year, the market for IT professional within the financial industry is absolutely booming.  Below is a guest commentary from Michael, CEO of our search firm.

2005 Progress Report
This has been an exciting year. We have seen a 245% increase in our revenues, and 820% increase in net income H1 ‘05 over H1 of ’04. Hiring levels within our niche of Financial Services IT are high. Clients are no longer just “kicking the tires” but pulling the trigger. All of our clients are looking for strong developers, primarily with deep skills in C++, Java & C#. Business drivers for these resources include Equity Derivatives, where new revenue opportunities are being uncovered both in the US and Asia. In addition,  the explosion of the Hedge Fund industry has resulted in IT needs in this space, as well as in the corresponding Prime Brokerage business within the larger firms. Here at NaviStaff we’re looking to grow our firm to handle the increased volume of requirements. If you are an experienced Recruiter or someone looking to get into the business, please let us know.