The new hot interns at electronic trading firms code in a "miserable" language

It's not just quants and software engineers getting internships and graduate roles in algorithmic trading; hardware engineers working on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are too. Firms old and new are offering entry-level roles in the field, but they come with challenges and risks.

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FPGAs are programmable circuits offering similar power and low-latency speeds to GPUs, but with more customizability for niche purposes. Rewriting circuits isn't easy; you'll likely be writing code in Verilog, which has been called "miserable" and "baroque" by its critics.

Despite this, Manuella Supiot, founder of executive search firm CRX, says FPGAs have "become trendy over the past few years." In addition to the heavy hitters like Jane Street and Optiver, new firms are building teams and hiring entry-level engineers. Hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies says it's building a "new FPGA function", and is hiring interns and graduates for it.

What do these interns work on? In an October blog post, an Optiver FPGA intern said they were "handed a blank slate" to redesign the interface between its FPGAs and the software sending them bursts of data. The intern said their work reduced memory utlization for that task by 80%.

Rather than computer science or physics graduates, students going into FPGA roles are most often studying electrical engineering. Recent FPGA engineering interns at Optiver, for example, have studied electrical engineering at MIT, UNSW and Cambridge. The intern above studied at Carnegie Mellon.

FPGA roles can be lucrative. A Jane Street graduate FPGA position pays a salary alone of $250k. According to the H1B Visa salary database, Citadel Securities pays an FPGA engineering lead $350k, the highest salary for the company on the platform. Supiot says that, for "game-changing" FPGA engineers (who are very few and far between), compensation has "pretty much no limit."

It's not all good news, though. Working with FPGAs can limit career options. Outside of the few major firms with established teams, you run the risk of being brought into a firm that's building a new FPGA team, only for management to get cold feet and scrap it. Supiot says she has "seen this multiple times in [her] career."

Even then, if the team survives, you'll face friction. Supiot says there's a chance your work "is not fully understood by the rest of the firm, so it can be hard to get freedom."

The upside is, if it doesn't work out in finance, you can fall back on a career in Big Tech. There are many more FPGA roles at the major tech firms; Supiot says the pay there is still high but "the technical bar is definitely lower." An entry level hardware systems engineer role at Apple, for example, pays up to $183.6k.

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