Waters Wavelength Podcast Episode 69: AQR's CTO, Neal Pawar, on Engineers & Open Source

This week on the podcast, Anthony is once again joined by Dan (last time…at least for a while!) to welcome this week’s guest: Neal Pawar, AQR Capital Management’s chief technology officer. AQR, which manages $187.6 billion as of March 31, 2017, is in the midst of a major buildout, upgrading different parts of its infrastructure, front to back, as the firm looks to continue its growth. To answer these enhancements, the need for talent has become increasingly important. Here are topics Pawar hit on during his time with Waters:

(1:45) Neal starts off looking at the fight for talent at colleges in the Northeast.

(3:45) A look at how fintechs are disrupting the finance space.

(6:20) What he looks for when hiring an engineer/programmer.

(9:35) Programming languages they’re most interested in (Python, Pandas, Scala).

(11:05) Ways to keep talented, experienced technologists.

(13:45) The impact and growth of open-source applications.

(14:55) The ethos of contributing back into open-source projects.

(17:25) The future of open-source and how to develop a legal/compliance framework.

(19:45) Why AQR has its engineers sitting side-by-side with the research department.

(26:35) Lessons learned as AQR has grown in size.

(28:00) To wrap things up, Neal, Dan and Anthony talk about soccer (Neal is a huge Liverpool supporter) and how they think the English Premier League will shape out (Anthony gives a stupid prediction about Manchester United).  

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Links to articles discussed:

Pawar to the People: A profile of AQR's Neal Pawar

The Infancy of Julia: An Inside Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language
 

Contact Info

As is the case with everything we do, we'd love to get some feedback from our listeners. Feel free to reach out to Anthony or Dan via Twitter or email.

Anthony: @a_malakian; Anthony.Malakian@incisivemedia.com

Dan: @dandefrancesco; Dan.DeFrancesco@incisivemedia.com 

Past 10 episodes:

Episode 59: Gabriel Woo, VP of Innovation at RBC

Episode 60: Bill Murphy, Blackstone CTO

Episode 61: Automating Processes

Episode 62: Shadow IT, CFTC's Giancarlo at FIA Boca

Episode 63: Acquisition Analysis, Rise of Data Spend

Episode 64: Open Source, Cyber, AI - A NATAS Recap

Episode 65: Public Cloud Providers Battle for Dominance, The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Episode 66: Technologists & Film Portrayals

Episode 67: A Farewell to Dan

Episode 68: An Inside Look at IBM Watson