Grasshopper

Grasshopper builds and operates proprietary trading technology for professional investment teams. They started in 2006 when founder John Lin spotted the gap left by closing SIMEX trading pits and committed to building custom algorithmic systems. Two decades later, they're a tech-led quantitative firm trading half a trillion in notional value monthly across Asia.

Their platform delivers ultra-low-latency execution, direct exchange connectivity, and institutional-grade engineering. They've been rebuilding their entire trading and data platform from scratch since 2015 to compete at a new level. They're expanding into options markets, bleeding-edge reinforcement learning models, and core system optimization — the kind of work that attracts serious technologists.

What matters for AI and data professionals: Grasshopper operates in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, with a new Vietnam office opened in 2025. They're actively hiring technology talent who want to work on low-latency systems, algorithmic trading, and advanced ML. Their culture values hands-on contribution, experimentation, and seeing impact quickly. Developers deploy code daily and tackle everything from system optimization to reinforcement learning. You're not optimizing for engagement metrics here — you're building infrastructure that directly moves real capital across markets.

The firm has doubled to over 100 employees and just raised external funding for Asian expansion. They're regulated by Japan's FSA and Singapore's MAS (through their asset management division). If you want to work on performance-critical systems where milliseconds matter and your code moves real money, this is the environment for it.