These are the technologists most likely to lose their jobs this year

Technology functions are still being targeted for cuts, recruiters have been flooded with applications and new opportunities are relatively few and far between. But some functions have been hit harder than others, so where are you more likely to be singled out for redundancy?

There's no clear cut answer to this question, but the (very broad) pattern seems to be that technologists in the front office are being shown the door more than those in projects related to core functions such as treasury, capital adequacy and clearing.

The obvious thing is that recruiters are reporting some techies are starting to emerge from RBS's cash equities business, although not in the large numbers you might expect. Elsewhere, banks are stripping out IT professionals in line with their downsizing of particular business areas.

"The major banks are moving away from a broad portfolio of products and focusing more on core their core business areas," says Dan Porter, director at IT in finance recruiters Thomson Keene. "This means the IT redundancies are happening in the front office, but the business area depends on the bank – sometimes its complex derivatives, others commodities or fixed income."

Very often, rather than seeking re-employment in another bank that may be building in their particular area of expertise, technologists are increasingly looking at opportunities in smaller organisations – whether that's trading houses or hedge funds – suggests Porter, which is reflective of banks’ appetite to recruit for front office tech projects.

Another area where many banks have been cutting back is in middle management. If you're in charge of a small team, beware, suggests one recruiter.

"Banks are either bumping up the management of a small team to a more senior ranking employee, or handing responsibility for two or three divisions to one person, rather than having a manager for each. If you're in middle management, it's a dangerous place to be," says one specialist IT recruiter.

There's also a particular surplus of infrastructure engineers on the job market, with the move towards virtualisation impacting the size of these teams in the City, suggests Mark Warburton, managing director of IT headhunters Pioneer Search.

"Infrastructure roles have always been easy to fill, but perhaps that's the problem considering the difficult job market," he says. "Last week I put an ad up for an infrastructure engineer within a mid-sized investment bank and received over 300 applications in four hours. I think that speaks volumes about how these divisions have been impacted."