The Quant Developer Stack in 2026: Self-hosted Market Data, GPU Backtests with Nix and Slurm, and the Path from Notebook to Live Signal
A quant team has two completely different problems to solve. One is research: lots of analysts, lots of notebooks, lots of Parquet, slow human-in-the-loop iteration. The other is production: a small trading desk, kernel-bypass networking, microsecond budgets, almost no humans. The mistake is trying to run both on the same infrastructure. The right answer is two stacks, one boundary.