Do I need the bitcoin blockchain for having a simple wallet using the bitcoind (daemon)? I want to start playing around a bit with the technical side of Bitcoins (thinking of setting up an exchange). So I built a bitcoind (daemon) binary from source and now the docs say that when I run that, it will start downloading the blockchain, which is several GBs large and takes a couple hours.

The only thing I want to do however, is create a simple wallet and make transactions from and to it. And because I ultimately want to deploy this to a server, I would prefer to not download several GBs. 

So do I really need to download the whole blockchain in order to get a simple bitcoin wallet? Or is there a smarter way than deploying a wallet on a server using the bitcoin daemon?
There are "lightweight" wallets, such as Electrum and mobile wallets, that do not require the blockchain to run.  In exchange for this convenience however, their users rely on a centralized server (or servers) to host the blockchain, which is a bit of a security compromise.

bitcoind is the "Satoshi client" and is not a lightweight wallet.  It won't work without the blockchain.