2026-09-25
Hiring Notes: What We Look for in Trading-App Engineers
Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.
We staff sprints for trading products. These are the signals that predict success.
Hiring for trading-app work filters differently:
Green flags:
- Has read market data before (knows what a tick, a bar, and a corporate action actually are)
- Treats money as integers, never floats
- Asks about the edge case before the happy path ("what happens if the feed disconnects mid-fill?")
- Has shipped something users paid for
Red flags:
- "I'll figure out websockets when we get there"
- Wants to write a custom charting engine (nobody should, Skia exists)
- Thinks testing is optional for financial code
- No opinion on delayed vs. live data
The Stock Picks team profile: senior-only, fintech-literate, allergic to invented fields — the contract defines the data, the UI renders it.
From the desk
Want this built into your product?
Open a work order — or try Stock Picks, the paper-trading app we shipped as our flagship case study.