Breaking into the limelight

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Lime Brokerage chief technology officer Anthony Amicangioli talks to Rob Daly about the three big issue he's currently dealing with – complying with Reg NMS guidelines; getting the firm's NJ-based data centre up and running; and the move to double his department's headcount, ideally during the next two quarters

Is Lime Brokerage ready for Reg NMS?

Anthony Amicangioli, CTO, Lime Brokerage:

 It looks like we will have to be fairly reactive in our approach because the rule isn't clear enough yet for us to understand our compliance requirements. We are good at responding to things like this in a very short amount of time. For example, there's a compliance requirement that states that you need to prove that the quote information you had at the time of forwarding an order validates that you forwarded the order to the location with the best price. That nature of compliance requirements could lead to some fairly significant storage requirements because quote rates are on the rise. Therefore, the amount of data you need to store is also increasing, since you are superimposing your trading activity with your quoting activity. We certainly have our eyes on that.

Will you have to reinvent your storage capability to meet this requirement?

AA:

 We don't know yet because Reg NMS has been through a number of iterations. It sounds very simple: you forward to the best price in the market. But as you get closer, you realise the complications of a world full of real-time systems where hundredths, if not thousands of seconds, matter a lot.

The question is if there is some central authority reporting quotes constantly, telling the world where to find the best price. If my system is slower and receives that message half a second later than some other system, but before I got that quote I went and forwarded the trade on to another place, what can be done about these kinds of problems?

Speaking of reinventing infrastructure, can you tell me a bit more about your new data centre?

AA:

We're expanding our primary site and will eventually bring all of the New York systems over to Jersey City, New Jersey, and replace the data centre.

Lime Brokerage has two existing data centres in New York and Massachusetts?

AA:

Yes. We generally suggest that our clients deploy systems at both facilities. The idea is that with our technology we send a constant stream of information from the primary data centre to the secondary centre, so if there is a catastrophic failure at our primary site, the second site can take over nearly instantaneously.

Are the two centres running hot-hot – that is, are they both processing data simultaneously?

AA:

 It's more of a hot-warm topology – the secondary centre receives data from the primary centre but only processes it if necessary.

When should we expect the new facility to go live?

AA:

 We should have it up and running by the end of this year. Construction is already complete. I expect the systems to be implemented over the next month to two months. We've designed it to be a self-healing facility, meaning that if we lost a primary or secondary system, the control software will automatically deploy a new system to take over. Our goal is to eventually have a lights-out, or a nearly-lights-out, capability.

How will the new data centre differ from the existing ones?

AA:

 We are always learning from our deployment experiences and the Jersey City facility represents what I hope will be the culmination of a number of experiences from the other centres. We've done a better job covering things like redundancies for the facilities. For example, for the cooling systems, we use an N+1 reliability model so that we can fail any cooling unit and not affect our entire cooling capacity.

The building we selected in Jersey City has two 1.5-megawatt generators, which was very attractive to us since we have experienced a failed generator in the past. Luckily for us, it was a short outage. We've learned that you can never have enough redundancy.

Additionally, we've stepped up the server technology we deploy. We're deploying Dell machines with dual-core Xenon processors. We've already qualified them and they've given us a nice increase in performance for our high-frequency trading applications.

How large is your technology organisation?

AA:

 Right now we are fairly small. We have about 25 people on board and we expect to get up to 50. It's a fairly small and nimble team.

How soon would you like to reach that staffing level?

AA:

 You always want to achieve staffing rates. If we could do it in two quarters, we'll do that. We're very selective in staffing and we're lucky to get one or two new employees a month. We do a lot of interviewing, but we're very selective.

What qualities are you looking for in a prospective candidate?

AA:

 This is something that differentiates us from other brokerages. What we look for first is a fundamentally good engineer. Also, we are often willing to hire from other industry segments instead of the financial technology segment. For example, we'll hire people in data communications, people who build storage appliances, or people in the content delivery segment.

Is that a challenge in the current economy?

AA:

 There are a lot of résumés out there. I wouldn't say there is a problem with the economy. It's a factor, but again, it comes down to how selective we are.

We model it this way: we say to recruiters: "We want a person who was in the top one or two percent of employees at their last job." When we get a reference we are always interested to hear that he or she was one of the best people, if not the best person, in the organisation.

Do most of your hires have financial technology backgrounds? Are there many who don't?

AA:

 We have both. We closed a few hires from the financial segment recently. We certainly need that perspective as part of the team. I would say that at least 50 percent of our hires have been non-traditional.

Are you happy with that? Would you like to see a change in that balance?

AA:

 We take it on a project-by-project basis. For example, when we are building high-performance technology, we have found that those in the non-traditional segment tend to work out very well. The evolution in the market has left a lot of people in the financial technologies space unprepared to push the technology to the performance levels we require.

With that said, however, when it comes to other projects that we are working on, such as a web services platform for a web portal that will give our clients a better experience, we lean more toward hiring people who have financial technology backgrounds.

Have you come up with the appropriate care-and-feeding strategy to retain the talent you hire?

AA:

 I think so. There are a number of factors playing into staff retention. We're in a great situation. Everyone we have interviewed has said: "I will take this job." No one has turned down a job offer from us. We pay competitive rates, and engineers really like working in an organisation that is committed to best practices.

On our team, we scrutinise everything from architecture to design to tests, including requirements. We write functional architecture specifications for everything we do. One of our team charters is that all of the technologies we create are the sum of the best ideas the entire team has to offer. That's something we, and I, repeat time and time again.

As I've mentioned before, we hire from non-traditional markets. At first, many engineers say they're not interested in the financial technology space, but you bring them in and show them the hardcore computer science problems that we are solving on a daily basis and they say: "Wow, I never expected it to be this challenging or this much fun." They're joining up. It's all really gratifying.

Rob Daly is deputy editor of Waters, a New York-based technology publication and part of Incisive Media.

Résumé

Name:

Anthony Amicangioli

Title:

 Managing director and CTO, Lime Brokerage

Hometown:

Newton, Massachusetts

Education:

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Family:

 Married with two daughters and a son.

First job:

 Right out of high school, I was support technician and junior engineer for Panametrics, which made x-ray-detecting satellites. I was also a sub-contractor for Hughes.

Current reading:

 Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared M. Diamond; it is hard to find time to read between work and the children.

Best part of the job:

Working with the team.

Favorite place outside the office:

The family house on Cape Cod.

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