Forum OpenACS Q&A: job: Hedge Fund operations automation

A contact has a potential consulting job opportunity at a New York City hedge fund. They want one person to help them automate their operations, reduce errors, improve visibility into their daily operations, free up business experts from manual grunt work better performed by a computer, and in general make their lives easier.

I don't really know what exact arrangements they'd want to make for hiring, but my guess is a several month consulting gig, with the possibility for additional follow on work based on how much they like working with you, how much room for additional improvement you uncover, etc.

More detail is below. If you or anyone else you know would be a good fit for this, please contact me! Send a resume (or a link to an online resume) to me, I'll forward it to the appropriate people, then they'll get in touch with you. Thanks!

Also, some of you may have seen or responded to this before in other forums (the ex-aD email list, etc.) If so, don't worry, no one forgot about you, it's just that some of the people doing the actual interviewing and such were out of town, and now that they're back things should be moving along shortly.

The players involved here are:

• A small R&D/Modeling group, based in Boston, responsible for both development and production deployment of financial models. They're programmers, using Unix, Oracle, R/S-Plus, OpenACS, Tcl, C, etc.

• A larger Operations group, based at company headquartes in Manhattan, responsible for all front and back office operations, trading, etc. Sharp group of people, but they're all business, finance, or trading types, NOT engineers or programmers.

You would be working directly with the Operations folks in New York. The Operations group is asking the R&D group to help evaluate and pick you for the job, and also to help define the initial projects and make sure things get off to a smooth start.

The right person for this job should:

• Probably be local to New York City - strongly preferred, at least.

• Be able to figure out and articulate the big picture, as well as implement the individual pieces to make it happen.

• Be entirely self-starting, talk to operations staff to figure out business processes, build systems to improve and automate those processes, sell the business users on your new tools and smoothly integrate them into daily Operations without breaking anything.

• Have a strong database background (much like any good OpenACS developer...).

• Be familiar with various tools in Windows as well as Unix world. Rapidly find, evaluate, and learn new tools.

• Start from a clean conceptual slate and build systems using or integrating with the most effective tool-sets for target audiences. (E.g., end-user tools will certainly include, but should not necessarily be limited too, MS Excel.)

• Be effective at teaching business folks how to use the new stuff you build, not just building it.

Initially, you would probably be working on:

• Refactor many Excel spreadsheets critical to daily operations, to improve maintainability, link in external data sources, eliminate redundancy and copy-and-paste operations, reduce errors, etc.

  Note: The only tool most of the Operations folks are currently familiar with is Excel, so while there are other data sources and tools in the picture - e.g., automatic data feeds from brokers going into an Axys database, broker web pages daily scraped manually for data, data fed from the R&D group's web site - the operations "glue" language is currently Excel, exclusively or nearly so. Part of your job is to determine if, when, and how this should be changed.

• Enhance existing Axys database used for incoming back-office trade data. Add additional data sources currently handled manually, improve reports as needed, etc. http://www.advent.com/products/axys/index.asp

• Revamp and automate data collection and workflow for reconciliation of incoming error-filled broker data. Sit down with business experts to learn how current manual process flags and fixes questionable data. Write program to automatically flag such questionable data. Write program to automatically scrape daily account data from broker web sites, and compare/reconcile against other data feeds. Etc.

• Anything else you identify as a good candiate for automation and improvement.

Down the road, further work might include (this is speculative on my part):

• Act as technical liason person between Operations and R&D/Modeling groups. Figure out what improvements Operations needs from R&D. Improve systems to feed back data from Operations into R&D systems. Etc.

• Act as internal technical Guru and education resource on any and all topics. E.g., answer Excel questions, how to get data out of Bloomberg, possibly introduce R statistical programming environment to anyone wanting an analysis tool more powerful than Excel, etc.

• More advanced automation of operations Workflow. Possibly build Intranet using OpenACS, etc.

• Automated trade execution via external systems.

• Data collection for use by traders and/or analysts from R&D group sources, from external data feeds, or etc.

Dude, even if you were a good fit for the job (which from your resume you aren't), that job posting above is nearly two years old...