Pros
The review title perfectly captures how I see working at this company. I joined as a complete newbie - sure, I had experience at other companies behind me and a trail of assorted university projects (both research and not-so-research ones), but I was honestly afraid I wouldn't cope. I understood what this industry is and how demanding it is to work in, and I knew how smart the people there would be. But I had no idea just how smart! I've been with them for years now, and every day I keep discovering how competent — and at the same time genuinely supportive — this team is. And that goes for every level: Analysts, HR, Developers, Infra Engineers, TradeOps and so on — I quite seriously feel some invisible connection with all of them. Picture a meeting where serious architectural decisions are being discussed, where people actively argue their positions — and yet somehow it doesn't feel like part of a monotonous, boring job, but more like a heated debate at a bar among friends. And they support you, they call you out (in a good-natured way), they agree (or not so much) — but most importantly, they're on fire about this work. That's how I see it. Maybe, reading this, you'll think: "Come on, you've just been at the company for a long time, that's all" — except I started feeling this somewhere around my first month. But the team isn't everything. Another essential part is the opportunity to unlock your potential by bringing your own ideas to life. In practice, if you see a possible improvement — an algorithm optimization, a better way to store data, anything at all — you're free to propose it. And you'll almost certainly get support, because this constant motion is what lets the company evolve and keep up with the times. And the support comes at every level, from your immediate team to other teams or the CEO. It gives you a sense of mattering, a sense that what you do, you're not doing in vain. And of course, there's the industry itself. Quantitative trading is a real treasure trove for engineers, both on the research side and the development side — it practically pushes you to write the kind of code you'd never write otherwise. Complex problems that demand elegance in optimization, that require writing genuinely high-quality code so that others can build on it — that's a challenge I, for one, very much wanted for myself.
Cons
You do need to understand that there's truly a lot of work here, that the problems are hard and will demand full commitment. The field itself is quite proprietary, and it will take substantial time to dive into it, to start intuitively grasping how things may work under the hood. And of course, the bar at the company is set high — the domain demands it. Perhaps that's exactly what creates that slightly odd but ever so fascinating atmosphere.
