Assalamu Alaikum,
I would like to get some general guidance on the permissability/impermissability of working as an engineer at various market makers such as Jane Street, XTX Markets etc. These instutions provide liquidity in the financial market, but trade various financial instruments including bonds, equities, ETFs, derivatives, commodities etc.
The job, in of itself, involves writing code to build a computational platform and associated tooling to enable software engineers to develop and run their code. The job does not involve making any financial models or executing any financial transactions.
That being said, the platform does not discrimate against the software that runs on it. In some cases the software running might be halal, but in others, but most of the time it will be executing financial transactions - most of which, to my knowledge, are haram. Although I would not be writing code that performs these transactions, I would be building the platform on which software that performs such transations runs. My understanding is that this would fall under the category of “helping in sin”, would this be correct view?
One a side note, would a role like cybersecurity at market makers be permissable? In this case one is not supporting any of the haram transactions, but is instead protecting the company’s systems from attack. Would this also fall under the category of “helping in sin”?
I’d like to add that a lot of these firms are highly technical and one will rarely get the chance to work with such systems outside quantitative finance.
Thanks in advance,
Yassine