> The sad part is that it was impossible to get anybody else working on it and I had to rewrite it in Java (and destroy performance in the process).

Java has a CFFI and while it ain't pretty, I don't see where the performance impact would come from, when machine code is to be injected and the critical path is in machine code / C.

> extremely low level (like understand what the CPU does when it gets an instruction) as well as the highest level (complex abstractions with Lisp macros, etc.)

Those skills don't seem all that far apart. I'd rather think it'll be difficult to find someone willing/able to encode and maintain financial / legal safety limits in machine code :-}