Pros
Customers are Wall St hedge funds, product is an FPGA based gateway for pre-trade risk analysis. Well designed software, written following Linux philosophy - C not C++, everything developed in-house, minimum open source. Software is optimized for high performance using classic techniques.- core pinning, lock free queues, poll loops, state machines. Code style is uniform, engineers are easily able to dive into any other component and readily understand it. CEO is software architect and has very strict requirements for how software is written. This is a blessing, and a difficulty, since, at times, it is hard to advance projects unless he has time to review the fine print (or until the VPs and directors bring him in for low level technical discussions). Company hires many out-of-school engineers, who are knowledgeable, enthusiastic and nice. Coworkers are uniformly 5 stars. A few senior engineers but top at their job. Excellent business setup - fee based support contracts with banks who bake the HPR developed infrastructure into their daily needs. Banks would not be able to easily swap product out - and usually do not have the engineering strength to develop internally a product as good as HPRs.
Cons
Support and maintenance are difficult, and deployment is painful manual process, instead of dev/ops. Salary compensation for senior engineers could be better. Sometimes things are micromanaged from the top. Overall, good work environment, interesting work, and much more many pros than cons.