Software Engineering at HRT
Solving the market’s greatest technical challenges: Latency and Scale.
About SWE @ HRT
Software Engineers at HRT design and build the highly performant, fault-tolerant systems that enable our worldwide trading.
We use a mix of high- and low-level programming language skills to maintain HRT’s most critical applications, from research infrastructure to our live trading platforms. Our bottom-up approach to projects empowers engineers to control their work from design through production, and build systems that address most interesting technical challenges in global markets.
Meet Our Teams
Our Software Engineers are assigned to two main groups: Trading Technology and Research & Development.
Each of these divisions has Acceleration and Platform sub-teams. Accel SWEs work with specific Algo teams to optimize their trading, while Platform engineers focus on one or more products used across all of Algo.
Trading Technology
Trading Tech engineers write the programs that enable HRT’s daily trading. They focus on parsing high-speed market data, placing orders with exchanges, applying hardware acceleration (FPGA/ASIC), and processing trades, clearing, and reconciliation. Their language focus is roughly 70% C++ and 30% Python.
Watch: C++ Engineering in Quant Finance: Himanshu's Story
Trading Tech Acceleration
“We put extra emphasis on the robustness, correctness, and the performance of the system.”
— Himanshu, Low Level Software Engineer
Research & Development
R&D engineers maintain HRT’s large-scale research environment. They architect the storage, data centers, CPU/GPU clusters, job scheduling and orchestration, data ETL, and research tools used by all Algo Developers. Their language focus is roughly 70% Python and 30% C++.
What It’s Like Being an Algo Software Engineer in Trading
R&D Acceleration
“Our code has to be clean, scalable, and fast… You can see the full pipeline and make a decision that optimizes globally rather than just locally.”
— Kevin, Algo Software Engineer
Open Source Contributions
Software Engineers at HRT use open source tools every day, and we believe that maintaining open source software is essential to advancing the state of modern computing. We proudly contribute to open source projects like Prometheus Alertmanager, Apache Arrow, Corral, and many, many more.
Related Insights
Software Engineering Opportunities at HRT
Software Engineer – C++
We are seeking software engineers with deep knowledge of C++, OS internals, CPU architecture, and networking hardware and protocols to build the systems that power our live trading and research infrastructure. In this role, you’ll work within a highly collaborative coding environment alongside researchers, traders, and hardware specialists to write programs that will make an immediate impact on our business.
Fullstack Developer
We are seeking experienced fullstack developers to join either our Platform team (to work on the infrastructure & tooling that supports all of our research & trading capabilities) or our Acceleration team (to work with a specific Algo research & trading team). All of our fullstack developers have internal customers and deeply understand end-user needs; they build backend processes to ingest and transform vast quantities of data, and UIs to visualize and action that data quickly.
Software Engineer - AI Tools
We are seeking experienced software engineers to help build and advance HRT’s AI tooling ecosystem. Whether it’s for a Python developer writing a web app, a C++ developer speeding up order execution, a researcher investigating trade signals, or even Business Development meeting with vendors, we are focused on increasing productivity across HRT by integrating the newest AI tools into our users’ workflows. You will have to navigate the rapidly evolving options in this space, and adapt them to our own internal systems.