Thinking about career in HFT with hardware background

[skepticc]

Hello! I am in grad school now and my major is EE. Through internship and academic projects, I gained some experience in hardware development- including FPGA programming. Moreover, my personal interest also lies within hardware design and verification.

I came across FPGA based low latency solutions for High frequency trading while doing some online research. I also did some work on academic settings on FPGA based low latency solutions. Though I read many good stuff about utilizing FPGA in HFT, I didn't come across job opportunities for FPGA/Hardware developer in HFT firms. With pure hardware development background, am I stupid to think about starting my career in HFT?

Any advice/suggestion will be highly appreciated.

 

[Harkkam]

Be careful about investing time and energy into HFT, the SEC is thinking about changing the rules about cancelled orders and thinking about charging a fee. Im not certain but pretty sure about this.

Plus HFT in my opinion offers zero value to the market place, simply using technology to front run orders, and spam the order flow to see the orders a ms before everyone else and make the spread.

But thats just my opinion because I work in a prop shop and I see the problems traders have dealing with HFT's.