I’m still in bed, iPhone in hand, eager to see if the changes I made yesterday were successful in Europe. No news is good news. Awesome. I head to the office early to run with the HRT run club, then check on a few processes that are running my code in production. Excellent! All is going smoothly. My job is to write highly performant code in C++ for HRT’s live trading system. Compared to other places I’ve worked, HRT moves extremely quickly. Despite our exhaustive suite of unit and regression tests, and regular manual checks in our test environment, an occasional bug still pops up in production. The majority of my day is spent juggling projects of various priorities and time frames.

Just as I’m in the weeds of one project, another idea, improvement, or challenge pops up. Thanks to HRT’s culture of “make it better” and freedom to explore, I’m almost always able to work on those ideas. In many ways, my work is an exercise in Depth First Search: peeling away progressive layers of changes, making other enhancements along the way, and knowing when to backtrack to the original problem. Occasionally I’ll get a question from the Algo Dev team about a market data feed that needs attention, or a ping from the business development team about what a particular field means in an order entry message, but most of the time I’m finding creative ways to make our live trading environment just a little bit better.

One of the best parts about Core is the constant communication within and across teams at HRT. I look at the clock and it’s already 5:30 pm. Where did the day go? My team is going out for dinner at the best burger place in the city — a monthly ritual.

Core is constantly looking for awesome programmers. In fact, one of the coolest parts of the job is working with other smart, talented developers.