Bright Java Developers needed, Structured Finance Experience Preferred Structured Finance?

Structured Finance is how small consumer loans are bundled up and used to fund bonds. By combining many mortgages, credit card balances, or other types of assets as part of a deal, and using the incoming interest and principal payments to pay coupons on a number of bonds, it allows one set of people who need to borrow money on a small scale (mortgage holders, consumers, companies) to connect to with people looking to invest money on a large scale (investment banks, pension funds, hedge funds).

About Markit

Markit is a financial data company, founded in 2001, that has seen phenomenal growth in the last seven years. (The company started with less than 30 employees; it is now 650 employees worldwide, with offices in New York, London and Amsterdam.) Within Markit, Structured Finance is a relatively young department; we initially entered the market as a calculation agent for the ABX indices. We now offer a full set of services, across all types of structured finance data. This includes end-of-day pricing, deal-modeling, timely reporting of bond and collateral trustee data, loan-level statistics, and derivatives. We work with both European and US data, and have presences both sides of the Atlantic.

Talk to me about Programming

Given that we are relatively new to the market, we have to rely on the smart application of technology to solve problems in a reliable, timely manner, while aggressively ramping up our data coverage. Some of the business problems we face are:

• What is the best way to describe the structure of deals in an application, given that each deal can have a completely bespoke structure, and is described in legal jargon in the original prospectus?
• How do we automate the parsing of messy data formats (e.g. PDF documents), to ensure fast turnaround of data, while making sure the integrity of the same data is checked thoroughly as it is extracted?
• What is the optimal way to present structured finance data in a unified way on a website, given the variety of deal structures and terminology across different asset classes and regions?
• How do we host large numbers of documents so they are fully-searchable, easily uploaded from a variety of sources, and downloadable both by-hand and programmatically?

Hey, You're Not Talking To Me About Programming

You're right, I'm not. Okay. We are Java-centric environment, with a smidgen of C++. Our web presence is deployed to Apache/Tomcat, hosted on Linux, and most of our data is stored in a large Oracle database. We use Subversion as our source control environment, Ant as a build tool, and maintain testing and QA environments which are rebuilt regularly. (We also use CruiseControl as a continuous build tool.) We use open-source libraries extensively, including JUnit. There is no particular IDE of choice, but each developer is expected to manage their own toolset.

The development team is currently 15 developers, so there is no particular specialisation. A typical developer here will be be with comfortable hand-coding HTML, writing PL-SQL, and coding the Java inbetween. They will also need to be quick to pick up new libraries and frameworks as needed for solving the business problem at hand. Some of the cool new technology we are currently putting into use: the Google Web Toolkit, JavaSpaces, Groovy, JNA.

What's The Catch?

You need to be good! We have a monthly release cycle, handled according to an agile-ish methodology, so there our work is very focussed on delivering results. Developers meet frequently with their business counterparts, and are responsible for converting requirements into firm specifications, then demonstrating the completeness of the code they produce. (Hence knowledge of finance, or the ability to pick it up quickly, is essential.)

We expect a very high-standard from programmers: any code needs to be as simple as possible to solve the problem, whilst allowing for easy extension to new domains; all code will be refactored aggressively, so unit tests are a must; and given the amount of role-switching within the group, clear and concise documentation needs to be maintained.

Still Interested?

Please apply with CV and covering letter to careers.na@markit.com citing "Associate/ Vice President, Fixed Income/ Structured Finance Java Developer" in your email.