What levels of compensation are we talking about here? Indeed shows ~$150k when searching for kdb in NY.
That sounds like the low-end base salary for ~entry level. It probably gets topped up with ~100k bonus. There are a couple places that hire many but don't pay well.
At what I think is the high end, I see about an offer per quarter of $500-900k base with $1-2M bonus (usually guaranteed for the first year) for pure technology role. Add more front office work and the bonus potential shoots up (but it's a tough gig at the moment at least).
For context, non-kdb principal level roles I've seen on west coast top out at around $1M, mostly in RSUs, from a say a $250k base at the usual names.
I've seen offers in the $1-10M range on the east coast to build competitive technology. Amusingly, on the west coast, I've only seen the stereotypical "be my technical cofounder and get screwed on comp" offers to do so.
It's not just knowing an APL though -- far from it. For the chi/nyc it's a mix of hardcore low-level stuff, and some market knowledge. For the west coast, a mix of low level stuff (less hard core) and more distributed systems stuff.
I'm interested to know more about this, assuming you have time.
Occasionally someone pops up wanting to do a company to compete with them but they're typically offering paper of dubious value, covered in slime.
In any event, I'm not particularly interested in going to war to steal their market share. I do worry that they're going to go into a long decline to irrelevancy though -- I'd very much prefer that not to happen. I'd rather they/FD write a new generation building on the best of arthur's work plus some things more suited for new platforms and workloads. There are big opportunities there.