Odd Lots · Thursday, July 9, 2026
Man Group's CTO, Gary Collier, highlights that while AI is augmenting roles and driving efficiency, the firm is also adapting its organizational structure. They emphasize 'forward-deployed engineers' working alongside quants and managers, fostering a collaborative environment where strategic planning and end-to-end process management are becoming more critical than deep-level debugging.
“We're very big on platforms, and we've got a bunch of teams and Tashara runs one of those that build out these big cross cutting elements of platform technology, in his case the Data iplatform, but a big part of the tech team are already and having for a decade and a half forward deployed engineers sitting with our quants, sitting with our discretionary managers. And one of my jokes often the people I'd be interfering to come join the team is all right, let's go walk across the fifth floor here in the bank House, and I want you to tell me who the engineers are and who the quants are. And I bet you're going to get it wrong, because what you'll see is very similar stuff on the screen, and that holds just as true today as it did decade ago.”
“I think the other piece that you want is somebody who's a bit more of a long term thinker, somebody who really wants to automate a process from end to end. They are happy not to be in the weeds in the loop, And when you think about technologists, that's actually quite difficult. People love being in the weeds, they love debugging issues, getting into the nitty gritty, but actually, fundamentally, you want to level up. You want to be a kind of a conductor of these agents. You want to be in charge of the end to end process rather than necessarily being in the weeds, almost like a manager who has a lot of technical expertise, so who is thinking about things in broader strategic terms is much more value than they used to be.”