From HFT to Enterprise Banking: The Talent War for Cloud Native & AI Engineers | RLS Search

Craig Whiting, Director at RLS Search, and Jon Freedman, Chief Technology Officer at Quant Fin, joined us at the Cloud Native & Open Source AI Conference in London for a panel discussion on the growing talent war across HFT, enterprise banking, cloud native, open source, and AI engineering. In this session, “From HFT to Enterprise Banking: The Talent War for Cloud Native, Open Source and AI Engineers,” Craig and Jon explore how demand for high-calibre engineering talent is changing as AI, cloud native platforms, open source technologies, and modern infrastructure become increasingly central to business strategy. The discussion looks at what different sectors are competing for, how expectations around engineering capability are shifting, and why cloud native and AI skills are becoming critical across both high-performance financial technology environments and large enterprise organisations. From hiring challenges and market expectations to the skills engineers need to stand out, this panel offers a practical view of the engineering talent landscape and what it means for both employers and practitioners. Whether you are a cloud native engineer, platform engineer, AI engineer, technology leader, recruiter, or someone looking to move into higher-performance engineering environments, this conversation provides useful insight into where the market is heading. About the speakers Craig Whiting is Director at RLS Search, working with organisations and engineering leaders across the technology hiring market. Jon Freedman is Chief Technology Officer at Quant Fin, bringing senior technical leadership experience across high-performance engineering and financial technology. About the conference The Cloud Native & Open Source AI Conference is Community Stack’s London conference for engineers, architects, platform leaders, AI practitioners, and technology leaders working at the intersection of cloud native infrastructure, open source AI, and production-scale systems. Hosted with BrainStation in London as part of London Tech Week, the conference brought together practitioners building real systems across Kubernetes, open source LLMs, AI platforms, agentic workflows, developer experience, governance, security, and production operations. No vendor roadmaps. No theoretical future-gazing. Just practitioners sharing what actually works. Learn more about Community Stack: https://www.communitystack.io/ Supported by Thank you to our sponsors, partners, speakers, and community members who helped make the Cloud Native & Open Source AI Conference possible, including BrainStation, Overmind, Appvia, Harvey Nash, Axiologik, Colibri Digital, T5 Digital, Nearform, Dash0, RLS Search, Doubleword, Postman, X4 Group, Engaging Data, BIMP, Aiven, and our wider community partners. About Community Stack Community Stack is a stewardship-led community infrastructure group, building and operating practitioner communities, conferences, platforms, services, insight, and research across AI, Cloud, Data, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Open Source, and the third sector. Website: https://www.communitystack.io/ LinkedIn:   / community-stack-hq   Community Engine: https://www.communitystack.io/engine Stay connected Subscribe for more talks from Community Stack conferences, meetups, and community events. Like this video if you found it useful, and share it with your network.