AMA Capital trades billions of dollars per day in the foreign exchange markets.
We are all engineers, and we all do a little bit of everything. We design and implement our own trading strategies and infrastructure, down to the networking code that ties us in to financial markets. We are a very small team (I am the only employee) and are looking to add one or two engineers who will focus on strategy or on infrastructure.
No experience or specific knowledge of finance is required. However, you do need to be at least interested in financial markets and to be able to implement your strategies carefully in C++.
An example of a project that a member of our infrastructure team could work on is a system for logging to non-volatile memory. We generate large logs that cover everything from prices to transaction data. NVDIMMs are a form of RAM that survives power loss. Hardware like this has been on the horizon for a while, but it is just now becoming available to early adopters. Writes to NVDIMMs will be nearly instantaneous and immediately durable. This project will be to develop an NVDIMM-based system that simultaneously functions as a log, an IPC mechanism, and a searchable database for analysis. Making this work will involve a number of pieces: kernel drivers, CPU cache control, lock-free synchronization, a daemon to write everything back to long-term (i.e. less expensive) storage, and more. If this works well, we plan to open-source all the pieces.