Bien Ngo has a unique perspective when it comes to the rapid growth happening at SIMON Markets.
He joined the company in August 2015 back when SIMON, which works to build transparency around complex, risk-managed financial products by way of a single, modern platform, was still operating under Goldman Sachs. Ngo started on the equity derivatives strategists team within the securities division, and three years later, SIMON spun out under the shared ownership of seven leading financial institutions.
Then the company grew. Quickly.
“When we spun out, the talent fully dedicated to the SIMON platform — from engineering to sales and distribution — had grown into a 30-person team,” Ngo, now the head of quantitative research and engineering, said. “Only two years later, we’ve tripled in size to the 100-plus person team we are today, and we’re still rapidly hiring.”
Ngo said it’s been a fascinating experience to be part of this growth. He’s had great opportunities, like building a unified language for how structured investments are defined, along with impacting the culture and having the chance to lead. That’s why Built In NYC caught up with him to learn more about his time at SIMON, and why Ngo said it’s the perfect spot for engineers.
What are your roles and responsibilities at SIMON?
I lead a team of both quantitative and data engineers at SIMON. The quant team’s primary responsibility is to build state-of-the-art analytics for risk-managed solutions, including structured investments, annuities and defined outcome ETFs to help the financial professionals using our platform better understand how these products best fit into their clients’ portfolios.
The data team is focused on building highly scalable data infrastructure and improving both internal and external stakeholder experiences with timely and accurate information to make more informed, data-driven decisions. My role is to ensure my teams are productive, happy and able to deliver high-quality results. I’m also involved with various cross-departmental initiatives to help scale the engineering organization and grow the business.
What’s an example of an exciting project you’ve worked on at SIMON?
Before SIMON, one of the core challenges facing the entire structured investments industry was a lack of standardization of the products and inconsistent terminology used to describe the product features, which created a lot of confusion for both financial professionals and their clients (the investors). I had an opportunity to work with other quant engineers, our sales team and clients to build a unified language that streamlines the way structured investments are defined, in terms of both data schema and how the products are represented on our platform.
SIMON is not only about the work we’re doing to empower financial professionals, but also challenging and empowering one another. ’’
Today, this standardized product schema has been adopted by 20 major financial institutions issuing structured investments and has streamlined workflows across the board. It enables issuers to upload thousands of products to the SIMON platform every month using custom API integration. It also serves as a foundation for all of our product, analytics and pricing models to be built on top, allowing the financial professionals using our platform to have complete product transparency and analysis — a user journey that was previously not possible.
What’s the culture like on the quant and data teams?
I am proud to be surrounded by an amazing group of world-class, talented individuals who are obsessed with building the most innovative solutions for our clients and trying to disrupt the whole wealth management industry. We’ve worked hard to establish and reinforce a workflow that is maybe less standard; it’s the exact opposite of a top-down approach where decisions have to be passed through the management team or department heads. SIMON is not only about the work we’re doing to empower financial professionals, but also challenging and empowering one another. This team embraces growth and new ideas.
The fast track
Why should applicants with computer science degrees want to join the quant and data teams at SIMON?
One of the most exciting aspects of working on the quant, data or any of the other engineering departments at SIMON is that we work with a modern technology stack — including Scala, Python, MongoDB, Snowflake and AWS. We have built and continue to build our platform from the ground up, and own end-to-end product features from the start, without being bogged down by legacy technologies. Most of our services are built using serverless architecture, which allows us to focus on actual business problems and improve the time to market for new products. We are able to build highly scalable data ingestion and run heavy analytics calculations without worrying about the underlying compute clusters. Moving quickly is powerful, and our tech stack lets us do just that.
If you have a computer science degree, are passionate about finance and investing, want to be at the forefront of innovation at a rapidly-growing company and want to work with extremely smart and collaborative teammates, then our quant and data teams would be the right place for you.
Moving quickly is powerful, and our tech stack lets us do just that.’’
