Jane Street's Python pioneer leaves for Jump Trading
Electronic trading, like other areas of finance, is riding the AI wave, and Jane Street is one of the firms leading the charge. Loren Puchalla Fiore, one of the firm's top machine learning engineers for six and a half years, is taking his expertise elsewhere, however.
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Fiore has defected to rival HFT Jump Trading, joining its London office as a lead research engineer. At Jane Street, he was most recently the head of machine learning engineering for Asia and London, based out of Hong Kong. He was also previously based in New York, running the research infrastructure group. According to FINRA's BrokerCheck, he left the firm in mid-March.
Fiore says he played a pivotal role in the firmwide adoption of python at Jane Street, to the point of it being the firm's "second primary language." He says he advocated for and built the firm's python infrastructure team and claims that the language has "the same level of support and tooling as OCAML" today. Jane Street described its Python ecosystem as "relatively young" in the latter half of last year, and was hiring developers to build Python tools at the time.
Fiore worked on OCAML too. He built real-time "feature‑engineering systems that process market data into more meaningful feature vectors" for the language.
Fiore is a PhD computer scientist with a background in computer graphics. His doctoral dissertation was focused on increasing interactivity in virtual environments when using virtual reality headsets. This means he's no stranger to GPUs, which Jane Street has quietly accrued ~5,000 of.
Jane Street wants to grow its Hong Kong office in spite of Fiore's departure; Reuters reported last week that the firm employs 400 people in the region, and wants to add two new floors of office space to make room for more. In London, where Fiore is joining Jump, the FT reports Jane Street wants to double its office space.
Jane Street and Jump Trading did not respond to a request for comment.
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