Unfortunately it isn't in our budget to hire a pro dev to the team but I can work attempt to increase time working with our corporate IT department which has some excellent devs.
$ git init $ git add . $ git commit -am "Initial messy commit."
You could start using a more refined approach from there, and that would be a start.
When I start working with someone else's code for the first time, I run these commands and immediately have a baseline to work from. Once you run these commands, you can start experimenting with your code, and you can start guarding against someone else's accidental bugs in the project.
This does assume some basic understanding of how version control works, but it seems you could learn the basics of git in an afternoon and start using it to provide a baseline.
Are you currently doing the "make a copy of the project folder and call it project_backup_110217" approach to version control?
The fact that you make quant software trading millions of dollar without version control surprises me. Is the quant industry really like that?