Chicago has been a centre of derivatives and electronic trading for decades, home to major exchanges, proprietary trading firms and market makers. Engineering in this world is unforgiving: microseconds matter, risk controls must never fail, and a single bad deploy can be very expensive. As these firms grow, some are adding engineering capacity in India, where large banks, exchanges and trading technology vendors have built serious low-latency and quantitative teams.

This post looks at what to hire for, how to assess it, and how to set the team up for success.

The talent pool in India

India's capital markets technology talent comes from several sources:

Global banks' technology centres in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad

Indian exchanges and brokerages, which run very high message volumes

Trading technology vendors building order management and market data systems

Quant and analytics teams in global capability centres

Engineers from these backgrounds often know C++, Java, Python, Linux…