A HFT firm is poaching more D.E. Shaw hardware specialists
Earlier this year, we spotted Hudson River Trading (HRT) hiring engineers from hedge fund D.E. Shaw's research division. More have since defected to the high-frequency trading (HFT) firm; the most recent to do has left after a two-decade stint at the fund.
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Brannon Batson announced yesterday that he is joining Hudson River Trading as a hardware engineer, based in New York. Batson is a credited author on each version of Anton, D.E. Shaw's biotech supercomputer utilizing custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips. The first was created in 2008, the second in 2014 and the latest edition was unveiled in 2021.
Another recent arrival is Jeffrey Butts, who spent almost 17 years with D.E. Shaw. He's credited on Antons 2 and 3, and is credited with a patent alongside Batsen and others for 'Multibody Simulation' associated with the Anton 3 academic publication.
Batson and Butts don't disclose what they're doing with HRT, but if he's working with his old colleagues, he's likely still working on ASIC engineering. Timothy Correira and Roy Mader, who we've previously covered, are both working with the technology. ASICs are custom-built hardware systems that can be optimized for extreme speeds; they're less customizable than FPGAs, another common hardware type in finance, but they sacrifice rigidity for speed. Although there are assertions that HFTs are looking to explore more mid and low-frequency strategies, HRT's focus on ASIC development suggests pure HFT is not stopping yet.
Curiously, the D.E. Shaw defectors who've joined HRT are dispersed across US. Correira is based in Florida, Correira is based in Colorado, Batson is based in New York and Butts says he is working remotely from Oregon, although this is not confirmed. The suspicion is that it's a remote team.
It's not just Hudson River that D.E. Shaw hardware staff are leaving for. OpenAI has welcomed an engineer from the fund recently; principal mechanical engineer Anthony Forte left D.E. Shaw after 17 years to become a member of technical staff at the AI giant. OpenAI's head of hardware, Richard Ho, is himself a D.E. Shaw alum and worked on the first two Anton computers. The recent $6.5bn acquisition of Jony Ive's io by the firm suggests hardware will only be more important for the firm going forward.
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