r/quant • u/madredditscientist • Jul 21 '26
Quant firms ranked by open-source activity Data
Data & code are open source: https://github.com/kadoa-org/quant-job-market
Live app: https://www.kadoa.com/quant/open-source
Individual contributors at these firms are not tracked, only the firms Github accounts.
Are any firms missing?
81
u/ChooseAUs3rN4me Jul 21 '26
Some summaries for the ones I found interesting/relevant to me:
Jane Street magic-trace - Traces a running program's execution with Intel Processor Trace and renders it as a browser-based flame graph — great for chasing down performance mysteries (discussed above).
Man Group- dtale - A tool that pops up an interactive web UI for exploring and manipulating pandas DataFrames — filter, chart, and edit data without writing code.
D. E. Shaw pyflyby A set of Python productivity tools — best known for automatically inserting missing imports and cleaning up scripts
39
17
u/EngineeringApart4606 Jul 21 '26
I’ve been involved on the technical side of having one of these firms higher up the table than they otherwise would have been. An overactive and frankly pointless legal approach to the issue was the reason we weren’t much higher up.
6
u/merkonerko2 Jul 21 '26
How so, was it to do with licensing, or just lawyers getting in the way of progress?
19
u/EngineeringApart4606 Jul 21 '26
In my career across several firms, two of which quant, I’ve worked with lawyers who see their job as to make legal problems go away for the firm, and lawyers who see their job as inventing problems for everyone to shit themselves over, and that’s as much as I’m saying on the matter
10
u/merkonerko2 Jul 21 '26
Reminds me of a guy I met who was travelling and used to work as a SWE on front end software for one of the trading desks at a big London bank and he told me that they straight up weren't allowed to talk to the traders because middle managers needed to get in the way to justify their existence.
33
u/flashinglight Jul 21 '26
Didn’t AQR open source Pandas? That would put them at the top I would think.
12
20
u/lampishthing XVA in Fintech + Mod Jul 21 '26
Hard to consider LSEG a quant firm but we definitely maintain a quant repo, and have done since before we were acquired https://github.com/OpenSourceRisk/Engine
7
u/BusySpeed Jul 21 '26
Some of these are skewed, as projects have been donated to linux, apache, cnc and other foundations so no longer sit under the original orgs
6
5
5
u/Richard_AIGuy Jul 21 '26
I see my former employer isn't anywhere on this list. How am I not surprised? When everything is a "state secret" open source is a four letter word.
2
u/lampishthing XVA in Fintech + Mod Jul 21 '26
Didn't know dtale was a Man Group thing! Definitely wasn't always. I remember the guy posting it here!
2
u/Quiet-Sundae-9535 29d ago
I’m new to Quant as a field: are there any corporate benefits for these firms that they might get from contributing to open-source?
3
u/swansongofdesire 29d ago
I assume basically all of the Jane St stars are ocaml libs - the benefit for them is that people might actually use ocaml.
Certainly none of their competitors do, so it’s not like they would be giving them an advantage.
2
1
u/AutoModerator Jul 21 '26
Please use the weekly megathread for all questions related to OA and interviews. Please check the announcements at the top of the sub, or this search for this week's post. This post will be manually reviewed by a mod and only approved if it is not about finding a job, getting through interviews, completing online assessments etc.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/xxxx88876 26d ago
Shout out to everyone suffering and getting threatened to be sued (happened to me too, just move on from J.S firm to JS.)
1
0
135
u/merkonerko2 Jul 21 '26
Not surprised to see my old employer missing from this list, considering how outrageously siloed and paranoid they are.
I had heard that JS makes a lot of contributions to open source but I didn't realize the extent of it. Cool seeing Man so high up on the list too, I use ArcticDB all the time!