Day: April 26, 2007

As I mentioned in my earlier posting, one of my first tasks here at NYSE TransactTools is to hire some great developers. The engineering team right now is 11 people strong, but we’re looking to grow that significantly.

I’m obviously biased, but I think this is something of a unique opportunity. Clearly we’re a technology-focussed business unit, so we don’t have what can often feel like the ‘support focus’ of the IT organization of a bank, yet we’re still in the financial domain and have the backing of being part of the New York Stock Exchange‘s exciting growth. Furthermore, it’s an NYC-based finance job, in the financial district, yet the atmosphere here is dress down (and yes, we really do have a pool table in the office!)

The actual technology is pretty cool too. The core of what we do is a financial messaging engine, responsible for processing many thousands of messages per second. We’re not the only people to do that though – where we’re unique is technologically that we add some interesting functionality around the core messaging server, and also our new position within NYSE is allowing us to offer some industry-leading integration options with the rest of NYSE’s networking technology (go look at our swanky new website for more on that side.)

Most of what we do is implemented in Java. A lot of it is pretty hard-core low level networking / multi-threaded code to allow the performance we need. We also have some web work happening since all of our configuration & administration is done through Java web applications (with a fair bit of AJAXey goodness throw in.) We are moving to a XP / Scrum based development methodology. We’ve already got card walls, 2-week sprints, daily stand up meetings and some of the guys even started pair programming this week. I’m working on getting Continuous Integration going (no surprises there!) and we’re going to keep going from there.

As of today we’re looking for Java developers, specifically ones with real experience doing the kind of hard-core code that makes up the core of what we do. We’ll no doubt be looking for some less experienced folk later, but not right now.

The official job posting can be found on our career’s page. If you’re interested in knowing more, drop me a line!

My ex-employer as of only 6 weeks ago have been bought by Sungard – I didn’t see that one coming while I was there!

Like Marc, I predict there’ll be a bit of employee turnover from this. Although I can see how the acquisition favors Finetix and Sungard as organizations, I’m sure there are some Finetix’ers who will be disappointed by their firm losing its boutique status. If any of you are interested in a job, let me know!