2

What We Do

The D. E. Shaw India staff collaborates closely with colleagues around the world to build cutting-edge proprietary software systems for the group’s investment activities across its systematic, discretionary, and hybrid strategies, and to provide research and operations support.

The D. E. Shaw group is trusted by investors across the world to manage their assets by seeking the optimal balance of risk and reward. While the group is known as a pioneer in quantitative investing, it also has considerable expertise in areas that involve fundamental analysis or portfolio manager discretion. The group uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools to uncover independent, hard-to-find sources of return across global public and private markets.

2.1

Our Work Approach

At D. E. Shaw India, we run on collaboration, not internal competition. Teams work together to share ideas, identify and address risks, build tools, and explore new opportunities. Our staff includes researchers, analysts, business-builders, and system architects relying on specialized operational expertise developed over more than 20 years.

2.1.1

Assets Under Management

As of June 1, 2024, the D. E. Shaw group had more than $60 billion in investment and committed capital. Our investment activities fall into two broad categories:

Alternative Investments

Our alternative investment capabilities date back to 1989 and consist of both larger, multi-strategy investment vehicles and more focused, strategy-specific investment products. These strategies focus on the delivery of absolute returns, generally with low targeted correlation to traditional assets like equities.

Long-Oriented Investments

Our long-oriented strategies focus on major, tradeable asset classes. Active Equity, launched in 2000, is a suite of strategies that allows institutional investors to customize their exposures to particular equity indices. Orienteer, launched in 2013, aims to offer diversified exposure to global asset classes, alongside other select alpha opportunities.

2.2

Technology

D. E. Shaw India builds sophisticated technology to advance the group’s trading activities and business processes. Technology is at the core of our business and we take pride in the capabilities we have built over the past two decades to empower our investment management functions.

An entrepreneurial spirit has always been a part of the D. E. Shaw group’s culture. When external platforms don’t meet our needs, we build our own. We created one of the first NoSQL databases in our industry, developed middleware that outperformed popular off-the-shelf products, created a service management platform for our private cloud, built a powerful data analysis library for Python before Pandas existed, developed superior infrastructure for building Python micro-services, and built a modern web engineering framework tailored to the group’s needs.

Our Technology team is divided into three groups based on their core functions.

Front Office Tech

The Front Office Tech group brings together some of the sharpest minds in technology to work on end-to-end solutions with their global counterparts, helping to solve complex financial and technological problems and directly impacting the group’s bottom line.

The team builds comprehensive technology solutions for the D. E. Shaw group’s trading strategies. It works on financial data-feed infrastructure, high-performance middleware, interactive trading systems, portfolio management and workflow tools, and quantitative analysis.


This group is divided into:

The Strategy Tech group operates at the intersection of deep domain expertise and technology, and every day its work powers decisions made by analysts, traders, and portfolio managers. Members of this team work closely with different business groups to understand the nuances of hedge fund trading and to deliver sophisticated solutions.

The Research & Development Tech group is involved in the research, design, development, and standardization of technologies for groupwide adoption. Members of this team work on cutting-edge technologies ranging from real-time trading systems and analytical engines to best-in-class workflow systems. They build the technological capabilities that implement scale and efficiency across our investment strategies, helping us stay ahead of the curve.

Quality and Test Engineering

The Quality and Test Engineering group works together with other technology groups at the firm to ensure overall product quality, including usability, performance, and stability. This team focuses on developing test strategy and design, engineering test automation, and building and maintaining test infrastructure. Members of this team work closely with business groups to understand their domain and to provide test engineering solutions.

Systems

The Systems group builds and maintains the technological infrastructure of the D. E. Shaw group. Members of this team design tools and self-service applications, manage the D. E. Shaw group’s state-of-the-art data centers, provide helpdesk support, and secure our technical environment. They manage a fast, complex, and secure server and network infrastructure for our trading platforms. The Systems group also maintains essential services such as email, directory services, instant messaging, and videoconferencing.

2.2.1

Open Source

As a technology development firm, we are an active user of open source software. We support the open source community by funding software initiatives, contributing ideas and features to existing projects, and releasing our own innovative tools.

Some of our notable open source contributions include:

Explore some of our other work on GitHub.

2.3

Financial Research

Our Financial Research group is tightly integrated with front office teams to aid their investment decision-making processes and provide fundamental research, financial modeling, and data analysis. They also support the D. E. Shaw group’s renewable energy business with acquisitions and financing, accounting, and the operational management of wind and solar assets.

Staffed by talented individuals with specialized research experience and deep sector expertise, this team collaborates with highly skilled developers to boost our research process.

2.4

Financial Operations

The core responsibilities of the Financial Operations group include fund and management company accounting, management reporting, profit & loss monitoring, tax (planning and operations), compliance, investor relations, reconciliations, and special projects.

The Financial Operations group is broadly divided into:

This group regularly evaluates the health and performance of our operations. It compiles financial statements on a periodic basis to present to investors, counterparties, regulators, and other government entities. The responsibilities of this group also include accounting, reporting, and audit support.

The Analytics team supports the D. E. Shaw group’s information requirements and is responsible for tracking transactions and maintaining our investor and consultant databases. They also prepare group-wide profit & loss and expense reports, compile the expense budget for the group, and handle other expense- and time-allocation processes.

This team provides assistance to ensure that the D. E. Shaw group’s activities are in accordance with the varied laws, regulations, and restrictions across the global jurisdictions in which we invest and operate. It consists of domain experts who help the group navigate the complexities associated with tax legislation, global regulatory compliance, and valuation models for private equity investments.

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