Jacob Stollznow

What do you do as a Graduate Developer?

I maintain and develop the desktop applications traders use to gain an overview of the market. These applications are low latency multi-threaded performant visualisations of the exchanges we trade. The most rewarding part of my job is seeing the features you have developed being used to provide liquidity to the many markets we service. At Akuna, due to the desktop application clients being in-house traders, deciding on feature specifications is a painless process. When we are not sure how a certain specification should be interpreted, we are able to approach the trader who raised the feature request and have a chat to them. This drastically speeds up the development cycle for new features and allows us focus on the important things. Being a UI Desktop developer, I coordinate across many teams to highlight the information important to traders. This allows you to gain a broad understanding of how we trade and how all the various internal systems work together.  

Tell us about you:

I have spent most of my upbringing in Adelaide, Australia, but I have lived in the US and Denmark too. I lived in the US when I was around 10 years old and then I went on exchange to Copenhagen for two semesters during University. I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering with a Bachelor of Finance at the University of Adelaide. I enjoyed my studies but my interest in software development saw me spend time outside of University developing these skills. My interest in both finance and software development made Akuna the perfect fit for me. At Akuna, I am able to develop in-house software with a financial aspect, catering to all my interests. The recruitment process was made easy through three rounds of interviews and testing. Following my offer, Akuna allowed me to start whenever it suited me, rather than being pinned to a specific date or time of the year.

Tell us about Akuna:

Akuna interested me as I wanted to be in the finance industry, specifically trading. What differs Akuna from competitors is our growth. Akuna is now about 10 years old and is still growing rapidly. This is what truly excited me about Akuna and made accepting my offer an easy decision.

Since joining Akuna, I have been exposed to several clubs and opportunities to grow. I am currently a member of both the basketball club and wine club. At Akuna, we have opportunities to learn about parts of the business which your team is not necessarily tied to. This is through programs such as the Akuna Options 101 course and Akuna-Us which are available to all Akuna employees.

Who could be suited for Akuna:

The people who would succeed as developers at Akuna have to be driven and great problem solvers. We deal with complex systems and resolving the issues at hand can be challenging. In addition, we are driven in our development of low-latency performant applications. The more performant we can be in our implementation, the more successful we can be as a firm.

Advice for students:

• Do not shy away from social clubs – I made the mistake of not taking advantage of some of the club opportunities I had at University. Clubs are a great way to meet other like-minded people and will often keep you in the loop about career or personal opportunities relating to that area.
• Follow your passion – If you want to work in the field of your degree, great! If not, that’s fine too. Many employees at Akuna have very different degrees in comparison to the area they work in. As long as you are willing to learn and are passionate about your role, you will be able to do it, all university experience is relevant and applicable and might even give you a unique edge over other candidates.
•  Don’t be scared of rejection – I applied to the graduate developer role at Akuna expecting not to be a chance as an Electrical engineer. But here I am, and you could be here too!