Could you help shave microseconds off trading times?

Low latency might have been the buzzword for some time now, but it's tipped to attract a broader range of players as time goes by. Recruitment, however, may have peaked last year.

Technological changes in the latency space have so far been mainly pushed to the buy-side, reckons Pierre-François Filet, CEO and co-founder of program trading platform QuantHouse.

"Firms who are already latency sensitive have already invested in technology. However, 85% of the market is still 'late' and they can save milliseconds."

But if this low-latency explosion is on the cards, it's yet to affect recruitment, says Stephen Feline, manager at IT recruiters the Kaizen Partnership.

"This was a big hiring focus in 2007, as firms looked to re-build trading systems in order to shave off microseconds. And while there's still a fair bit of hiring so far in 2008, it's nothing like on the scale of last year."

Chris Pickles, head of investment banking and global accounts at BT Global Financial Services, says that firms looking at reducing the latency of their trading systems are taking on people at the top level who have the technical nous to advise on how to proceed.

"A low-latency solution can't be achieved by software or hardware alone and technologists need to understand how they can work together. On the development side, it's often getting down to machine code level. The other question is where to find the people who have both the technical and the business knowledge - these are few and far between."

Feline adds: "It's about getting down to the syntax behind the code. Taking Java as an example, candidates would have to be very good at core Java and multi-threading, as opposed to J2EE or any kind of web-based applications."