We hire people who raise
the technical ceiling.
A focused, research-led approach to executive search across quantitative engineering, software, machine learning, infrastructure and technical leadership.
Our approach
- Seek to understand — we separate the job description from the real hiring problem.
- Own the process — one point of contact, full accountability from brief to close.
- Sell it straight — candidates get the honest pitch, including the parts that aren't perfect.
- Hold the standard — we qualify for evidence, not CV keywords, and say so if someone doesn't meet the bar.
What we do
Five specialisms for the exceptional.
Reload runs a focused, research-led search practice across the five focus areas below. Each is a genuinely different discipline with a different talent pool, a different technical bar, and a different set of failure modes when firms try to hire against them alone.
01 · Services / What we do
Quantitative Engineering Recruitment
The rarest hire in the market — real systems engineering depth and the mathematical fluency to work credibly alongside quantitative researchers, in the same person. Get it wrong and it's slow to unwind.
- A genuine talent bottleneck. Research and strategy teams have scaled faster than the engineering capacity supporting them — in some firms, one engineer to every ten researchers.
- Depth over breadth, evidence over claims. Systems that have actually shipped, not just been described. We look past a keyword-matched CV.
- Finance experience is rarely the filter. The majority of strong quant engineers we place come from hardware, semiconductor, general software, or academic research — markets are taught on the job.
- Sourcing beyond the obvious pool. We reach engineers who aren't job-hunting through direct relationships, not job boards.
02 · Services / What we do
Software and Systems Engineering Recruitment
The widest, most-misunderstood category in trading tech — four genuinely different disciplines under one job title. Doing this well starts with understanding which one a role actually is.
- Four distinct tracks under one label. Core trading systems, post-trade & risk, internal developer platforms, and market data — each demands a meaningfully different profile.
- The bar is systems depth, not algorithm trivia. Firms increasingly probe memory layout, concurrency, and how code behaves under real performance pressure.
- Assessed against the specific track, not a generic screen. The difference between someone who looks right on paper and someone genuinely suited to the system they'd build.
- Access beyond job-board talent. Low-latency and performance-critical engineers rarely apply cold — we reach them through relationships built directly in the market.
03 · Services / What we do
Machine Learning Recruitment
Machine learning inside a trading firm looks nothing like a Big Tech AI research role. Hiring well starts with understanding how genuinely different this work is — and pitching against that reality, not the generic AI job description.
- Weeks, not years. Models here move from idea to live production far faster than Big Tech — candidates coming from pure research aren't always prepared for how quickly ideas are tested against real outcomes.
- Applied depth over credentials. Real evidence of taking a model from research into a deployed production system, not academic publications alone.
- A fast-growing category. Dedicated AI functions inside trading firms now sit as central research capabilities spanning multiple desks — competing directly with Big Tech for the same talent.
- An honest pitch against Big Tech. Faster deployment, real production ownership, measurable impact — being direct about what the work actually involves.
04 · Services / What we do
Infrastructure and Reliability Recruitment
Not cloud DevOps. The work sits considerably deeper — Linux kernel-level tuning to eliminate latency, production engineering that carries direct trading-desk impact when it moves.
- Deeper than standard SRE. These engineers routinely work at the OS and kernel level, tuning scheduler behaviour and managing resource contention under real production load.
- Front-office adjacent. Support live trading systems, researchers, and portfolio managers directly — when something breaks, the consequence is immediate and financially visible.
- Assessed on real depth, not tool familiarity. Genuine incident experience and comfort taking ownership under pressure, not just cloud-provisioning tickets.
- Finance experience is optional. Strong candidates often come from tech firms and infrastructure-heavy backgrounds with no prior finance exposure.
05 · Services / What we do
Technical Leadership Recruitment
A genuinely different search from a senior IC role. The bar isn't just deeper technical credibility — it's the ability to build and retain a team in one of the most competitive talent markets in technology.
- Retention risk is the real risk. A leader who can't hold the team is a compounding problem — not just their departure, but the strong engineers hired specifically because of them.
- Technical credibility is table stakes. Engineers won't follow a leader they don't respect technically, but that alone doesn't make a strong hire.
- A strong IC ≠ a strong leader. One of the more common mis-hires we see firms make when they promote or search on technical CV alone.
- Evidence over title. We weight team-building and retention track record as heavily as technical depth — real proof someone has actually kept a strong team together under competitive pressure.
Example roles we've placed.
A representative slice of the mandates we've filled across each specialism.
Quantitative engineering
- Quant developers
- Research engineers
- Simulation & backtesting engineers
- Pricing & risk systems engineers
- Strategy engineering
Software and systems
- Distributed systems engineers
- Low-latency C++ engineers
- Python and Java engineers
- Performance engineers
- Post-trade & risk technology
Machine learning
- ML engineers
- Training infrastructure engineers
- Inference infrastructure engineers
- Applied research engineers
- AI research engineers
Infrastructure and reliability
- Production engineers
- Site reliability engineers (SRE)
- Networking engineers
- Incident leadership
- Kernel & OS-level tuning
Technical leadership
- Staff engineers
- Principal engineers
- Engineering managers
- Technical programme leads
- Heads of engineering
- CTOs and VPs of technology
