| They're not exactly forthcoming, but it's not the hyperbolic mystery the mythos would have you believe. You can piece together what matters to them - in the abstract - by searching MathSciNet for papers published by their researchers prior to joining. For example, it's pretty easy to see they hired an information theorist away from Princeton in 2017. But obviously that's not enough to reproduce everything they do, or else they wouldn't still be legendary. As it happens a lot of what makes them successful is not the sophistication of their trading algorithms and research, but also the sophistication of the execution and reliability. As an aside, from friends there Renaissance hires researchers in three primary ways: 1. They have a small network of professors who they solicit for promising new PhDs willing to leave academia each year. 2. They watch professors and postdocs in specific specializations, and reach out to those whose research meaningfully interacts with a thesis they're interested in internally. 3. They send small groups to conferences to poach people working elsewhere in industry (particularly tech) whose work is applicable to their own. They also do hire people who directly apply of course, but most hires are reactive. They especially like to hire people whose work or research looks like it might begin to encroach on their own, or is just notable and impressive. The math is certainly important to them, but that's just one dimension of it. |