|
I manage technology research and development across several areas of the firm. I usually participate in the full software development life cycle from spec to design and implementation to deployment. My work is mostly dedicated to our trading activities, and I've been involved in several different trading strategies here. I try to learn how each business and financial market works so I can help dream up ways that our strategies can benefit from technology, and so I can understand what the priorities are. I would consider my job basically problem solving, where I use my accumulated knowledge of our research and technology to try to figure out the most efficient way to solve each new problem.
How has your role developed since you started at the firm?.
I knew virtually nothing about finance when I started. I started out doing strict software development for one particular trading unit. My first project was to take a trading system originally built for the U.S. and make it "understand" foreign currency instruments. This kind of work caused me very quickly to start learning about the products we trade, and soon thereafter I was learning about the strategies we use to trade them. I started getting more involved with the core of our technologies and some of the quantitative research we do, and eventually started managing other people toward the same goals. Then, as the firm started to add new trading strategies, I worked to figure out how to expand our technology to those also.
What was it that originally attracted you to the D. E. Shaw group?.
I was looking for possibilities outside of a really traditional software development role. I wanted to find something where the domain that I was working in would also interest me. Since I was interested in both math and computer science, I thought finance would be a good area where the software work would also use some of my math skills. I figured that, by going into an area that I really knew nothing about, I was guaranteed to learn something new. Seven years later, I still feel like I'm learning something new all the time.
When I ran across the D. E. Shaw group, it looked perfect. I liked the fact that they seemed to value technology very highly and looked at it as a core part of their quantitative trading, and not just support. And while I looked at many companies with many talented people, I felt that the firm was the most effective at hiring really smart people. I went to MIT so that I could surround myself with people from whom I could learn and be challenged, and this job seemed like a totally natural extension of that concept.
What about your role gives you the most satisfaction?
I get to do so many different things. Even from one day to the next what I'm working on or thinking about might be totally different. The firm really gives employees a lot of responsibility, and the financial markets themselves are pretty rapidly changing, which is another reason the job never feels repetitive or mundane. The software we build is for our internal use, which can be really great because we don't have to spend a lot of time responding to customer complaints or adding purely cosmetic bells and whistles as long as the software is usable by our own employees, we can concentrate our time on the real functionality that we want. Another great aspect of my job is how much I get to help figure out what to work on myself. Since I understand what we're trying to do, I am well placed to think up creative ideas to benefit our business, and I really feel like I'm a core contributor. | 