— Project N°01 / Fintech

Helios Trading Core

Sub-millisecond order-book engine with FPGA offload.

N°01 · FINTECH
Client
Confidential HFT
Year
2025
Duration
18 weeks
Team
6 engineers
— STAR breakdown
S

Situation

A Chicago-based HFT firm was losing arbitrage windows to competitors. Their legacy Java matching engine ran at 340ms p99 tail latency and could not sustain more than 700K events/sec during volatile sessions.

T

Task

Deliver a next-generation matching engine with sub-10ms p99, capable of 4M+ events/sec, cutover with zero downtime during trading hours.

A

Action

  • 01Rewrote the core order-book in Rust with lock-free ring buffers and NUMA-pinned threads.
  • 02Offloaded market data ingress and risk checks onto Xilinx FPGAs to shave hot-path microseconds.
  • 03Introduced a shadow-trading harness that replayed 90 days of prod traffic against the new engine.
  • 04Executed a canary rollout venue-by-venue behind a feature-flagged router.
R

Result

  • 8ms p99 latency — a 40× improvement over the legacy stack.
  • 4.2M events/sec sustained across peak sessions.
  • 6× throughput at 38% lower infrastructure spend.
  • Zero-downtime cutover; full production migration in 11 days.
— Stack
RustFPGAKafka
— Long form
Read the full story of Helios Trading Core

A four-chapter narrative of the engagement, in the words of the team who shipped it.

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