Ah, I see. In that case, the financial sector may be the way to go. They&#x27;re always looking for people to improve throughput, and there are a variety of fun tasks to do related to low latency market data processing.<p>I would say your best bet is to focus on skill. If you can dive into a large C++ codebase and solve a crash, you&#x27;re skilled, and people will find your contributions helpful once you&#x27;re there. So that&#x27;s really not such a high bar to aim for.<p>In terms of experience, this tends not to matter too much. Use a talent agency to place you in the field. They will take a chunk of whatever value you would have otherwise pocketed in salary. But it&#x27;s a way of getting in to the industry that I know from experience works. It&#x27;s much more effective than trying to send resumes or cold call managers, which is why it might have seemed like &quot;experience&quot; is a necessary requirement.<p>Experience is just a proxy for skill, so if you have skill, you&#x27;re fine. A portfolio is helpful, and I&#x27;m sorry to say I can&#x27;t think of specific projects that you might like to work on.  But I know that if you can optimize a trading company&#x27;s firewall-to-firewall time, you&#x27;re highly valuable to them.