Structured Finance as a Fantastic Career Option for Engineers

After finishing my engineering, I headed straight into a Investment and Business Researh firm called Evalueserve. I worked for two years doing equity research in several sectors such as Human Resource Staffing industry, Airline Services, FMCG and Consumer goods,etc. However, the charm of equity research started waning for me after the first year beacuse of its 'non-quanty' nature. The first year in equity research can be both challenging and intellectually simulating for an engineer because learning to analyse financial statements such as income sheet , balance sheet and cashflow statements requires you to think very differently from the typical 'enginering' bent of mind.
I had learnt several advanced techniqes in financial modelling and analysis in my CFA Level II and had completely mastered financial statement analysis. So after two years of working in equity research, I found it not very intellectually challenging for me. So I started exploring other options within finance something more quantitative to satisfy my apetite for high-end number crunching and analysis.
This was 2008, the year of sub-prime crisis. Securitisation and structured products was what every one was talking about , of course in the negative sense. Although, I had studied topics of securitisation as a part of my curricullum in CFA Level 2, I had not gone into researching too much detail about it. I started exploring about Structured Finance market and to my surpise I found it very exciting. It is a heavily quantitative filed, I will talk about the different job profiles withi in it later. After devouring several websites on securitisation, sub-prime crisis and its reasons, I was eager to get into the Structered Finance market at a point which was probably the lowest in its history. What's more risky in terms of career decision was that, people in the industry were getting fired all over the place across the world. So essentially I was trying to enter a field which everyone was either exiting or looking to exit.
Nonetheless, blind in love with Structured Finance, I joined Standard and Poor's Structred Finance division as a Credit Analyst. My job was to analyse some of the sub-prime securities that had caused all the havoc in the world !