Unlike quants, quantitative developers are more product-centric. Their job is to take the pricing models (the output of the quant effort) and make them deployable and accessible to the traders, sales teams and the middle and back offices. Their primary unit of work is a product because when the product definition changes, regardless of whether it uses a new or an existing pricing model, they have to integrate it into the system. Even if it is merely a product variant, they have to implement all the infrastructure and take care of the approval processes for its downstream handling. For this reason, the work paradigm that makes most sense to a quantitative developer is product-centric.
Compared to the quants, the quantitative developers are closer to the day-to-day activities on Front Office and Middle Office. They view the trades (identified by unique IDs) as instantiations of products. Once booked, they end up in the trading platform database as distinct objects with attributes defined in trade inputs. In addition to trade input, they use market data feeds to price a product in the form of a trade. The trading platform comes with a pricing interface which combines trade information and market data. It also runs in what they call batch mode — regularly at a given time of the day to compute prices and sensitivities of all trades. Since it is the trading platform that performs the batch job, the quantitative developers may take care of the associated resources like the grid computing platforms, market data feeds, trade databases etc. In this respect, their product-centric perspective may get diffused into a trade-centric view.