Cloud9 Technologies is one of a string of regtech firms offering technology to monitor investment banks’ trading teams, so it’s no surprise that it’s targeting sell-side firms as it builds its team. The start-up has backing from hedge fund mogul Steve Cohen, and has also been hiring from large investment banks.
One of those recent recruits is German Soto, its global head of corporate development, who joined in the middle of last year from J.P. Morgan, where he was an executive director within its strategic venture capital division.
“Before joining at J.P. Morgan, I worked in management consulting as well as private equity investing in later-stage financial services companies, and through that experience, I got a glimpse of some things that affected the industry and how startups could address challenges,” Soto says. “Around the crisis, it became apparent that there was going to be a huge need for compliance technology and regulatory technology.”
There are different departments at banks which use Cloud9’s technology, and the firm looks to hire people who have served in these roles: traders who want to use it to communicate with each other, compliance specialists who want to better monitor activities of the traders and archiving their conversations, and the technology administrators making sure the service is up and running. It’s looking to hire developers – with or without banking experience.
“The candidate profiles that we’re targeting for the first area of our traditional development team are primarily folks with experience with WebRTC and C-suite of languages, including C# and C++, but that is going to evolve, as we’re developing other applications on HTML5,” Soto says.
Like many firms, Cloud9 is looking for machine learning and data science talent as well. Knowledge of the Python programming language is a prerequisite.
“All of our analytics business is built off the use of AI, machine learning and deep learning, which are critical, so we’re looking to how we can grow our efforts there,” Soto says. “We’re looking for more junior candidates in that area, because we’re happy to do training there.”
Brian Hunt, the chief administrative officer of Cloud9, says the firm’s recruitment focus shifted.
“At the onset of the year, we were looking to build our core product out and expand our user base, so we hired UI and web-portal developers, mainly C#, WPF [Windows Presentation Foundation], HTML and JavaScript programmers, and back-end developers to scale the system, mainly Java and PHP developers,” Hunt says. “We’re always expanding our DevOps team, like any cloud-based company.”
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