There are plenty of regular old software engineers in the industry. You don't have to be a math genius or a finance oriented guy. Doesn't mean you'll be trading or working directly with quants, but the amount of code required to make this work end to end is quite large and requires a lot of good software engineers.
Definitely. A bunch of HFTs even post on Who's Hiring here on HN.
It's a rather diverse industry in terms of the type of developers being sought. People with skills ranged from low level hardware design all the way up to Haskell/Scala are pretty constantly in demand.
