Hi everyone, I'm looking for consulting opportunities as a quant/algorithmic trading developer. I am a very experienced Silicon Valley software engineer with an Internet scale search engine background. I have experience in Java, C++ and a dozen other programming languages. Very reasonable rates!
Whatever makes sense for the project and for the client. Feel free to contact me personally if you wish to discuss this further.
From what I have seen. The skill set in silicon valley and the one needed for trading share very little. Trading requires dealing with realtime feeds, running computations, and managing orders in a competitive time limit. If any piece of the system goes down you have to adjust to that. Silicon valley deals with large amounts of data but the handling is done in map/reduce jobs with hadoop. When something crashes you just restart it; theres no lost money. Aside from twitter, I dont know of any streaming feed.
To some extent I agree: your description does capture maybe 90% of the work done here. That doesn't mean that an engineer with search experience is not going to produce good code in a real time environment. I used to be in the embedded industrial software market space before moving to California. I know what real time means. That said, I don't have a previous experience in algo trading.