What drew you to consider a career at a trading firm versus technology firm after University?

I participated in an electronic trading competition in my final year at university, which got me really interested in trading. I loved the combination of computing, finance and mathematics. A friend then told me about Susquehanna so I went to the firm’s website and applied. Of the offers I had, Susquehanna was the only trading firm I considered. I decided to join because of the exposure I’d get to different teams and the opportunity to learn more about finance, the markets, and how exchanges operate. 

Tell us about your experience in the Graduate Software Developer Program.

I was very excited about the opportunity to rotate into different teams. My first rotation was in risk, where I used C#, XML, and WPF and worked on projects that focused on front-end UI and back-end data processing. Next, I rotated into our connectivity team, which focuses on getting data from exchanges to Susquehanna and sending orders back to exchanges as fast as possible. Here, I’ve worked with C++, Python, Linux libraries and multiple networking protocols (like TCP, UDP, and multi-cast) on projects that ensure the speed and reliability of the systems that facilitate this data transmission.

We talk a lot at Susquehanna about our lack of focus on titles. How would you describe the growth you’ve seen in your role?

I’ve always had a lot of autonomy in my work and was trusted to put code directly into production pretty quickly after moving through my rotations. Additionally, the projects I’ve worked on have been pretty impactful. One that stands out is an app I wrote to synchronise files between different servers quickly and reliably. Susquehanna has servers all over the world and if we want files to be on two systems in real-time and in sync, my app has to be used to achieve that. That’s pretty cool.

Tell us about a typical day.

I’ll collaborate directly with our trading systems support teams, the traders, and other engineering teams to deliver solutions to any production issues before the market opens. From there, I’ll work on projects I’m assigned. Recently, I’ve had a chance to get some international exposure as well, which has been great. I’m working on a project to migrate solutions to our office in Sydney from our HQ in the US to ensure we’re continuously able to optimize our trading and data transmissions systems and infrastructure. I’ve had to read a lot of documentation and have been able to partner closely with my counterparts in our US to learn from them and brainstorm solutions. It’s been great to get that international exposure and to work on something that will help to facilitate future application migrations and support.