Saksham Sharma joined Tower out of college as a quantitative developer. Eight years later, he helps lead quantitative research technology for a global trading team, building systems that improve research productivity and support stronger trading outcomes. His path reflects the kind of career growth Tower aims to support: deep technical work, meaningful ownership, and the freedom to spot problems, shape ambitious solutions, and build on each success over time. 

Read on for Saksham’s perspective on scaling technical impact, applying academic ideas in practical settings, and what makes Tower’s global engineering culture distinctive. To learn more about careers at Tower, explore here.

You’ve been at Tower for eight years. How has your role evolved in that time?

My career at Tower has evolved in distinct phases, but all within the same broader global trading team. I joined as a quantitative developer right out of college, initially focused on building C++ and Python systems for new trading and research initiatives. Early on, I had a lot of freedom to contribute not just to implementation, but to the research process itself. That shaped the rest of my career: thinking about how to design technology that meaningfully improves research productivity and trading outcomes.

The next phase was defined by greater ownership: spotting opportunities, shaping projects from first principles, and seeing them through from concept to completion. In this phase I developed various low-latency C++ abstractions, build systems, research library design, distributed systems, and so on. What made that stage especially interesting was that success often depended on the ambition of the projects I was willing to take on.

Today, as a Director of Quantitative Research Technology, my focus is on scaling impact. That still means designing and building complex systems, but it also means leading a team, aligning people around a shared technical vision, and helping others do some of their best work. Even though I spend a significant part of my day writing code, I also spend a good amount of time thinking about how to extend the reach of that work through leadership, mentorship, and project design.

What first attracted you to your role? How did your education/training prepare you for it?

I studied computer science, with a focus on programming language research and distributed systems. At Tower, I quickly saw that the ideas I had spent time on academically could also be highly useful in practice. That connection between theory and real-world impact was one of the things that immediately drew me in.

Quantitative development at Tower is very broad, spanning systems, algorithms, performance, research tooling, and developer experience all at once. There is real room to apply both academic ideas and practical engineering judgment. In my time here, I have drawn from nearly all of the courses I took in some capacity. The kind of deep, nuanced systems research I was exposed to in my academic time was very naturally applicable at Tower. Even now, I still find those connections showing up in my day-to-day work; just last week, I revisited one of my academic papers from 2018 for inspiration on an algorithmic problem.

All this made the decision to join Tower an easy one, and it is still one of the things I value most about being here: the areas I studied and enjoy working on in school continue to matter in practice.

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in your time at Tower?

One lesson I’ve learned is that some of the most successful projects start with an individual noticing a problem firsthand and being passionate enough to solve it. Such projects require a healthy mix of ideation, optimism, and good execution. Tower’s culture of transparency definitely encourages that. People have enough visibility to look beyond their immediate tasks, pursue an idea seriously, and build momentum around it.

Another major lesson has been the power of compounding. A lot of my success has come from being able to build my new projects on top of my prior ones. That has shaped how I think about building a career: have a long-term vision, stay optimistic enough to pursue it (some blind optimism doesn’t hurt), and execute through intermediate projects that stack on top of each other over time. This way, your projects and your career grow multiplicatively instead of additively.

What coding languages do you use at Tower? How do you stay up to date with the latest techniques?

Tower is big on C++ and Python. We pay close attention to developments in both ecosystems, and I’ve personally stayed engaged through conferences, technical talks, and some involvement with the broader C++ community. Because the quality of our software has a direct effect on our business, we care a lot about language design, tooling, and the evolution of the underlying ecosystems. I especially value C++ for the control it gives you over performance-critical systems, while still allowing for elegant abstractions when used well. These days, I often work on building C++ systems that are then surfaced through Python interfaces, which gives researchers both speed and flexibility. The combination of these two languages is quite enjoyable and has recently shaped my interests.

Tower operates around the globe. How does that influence your work and overall experience at the company?

I’ve worked at Tower’s India, New York, and Chicago offices, with most of my time spent in NYC. Tower is a truly global company, with employees visiting various offices regularly as their work requires. One advantage of that global footprint is that we operate continuously without placing the burden on any single office. In practice, that often means collaborative mornings with colleagues in other regions, followed by quieter heads-down work later in the day. It also brings together people with different technical backgrounds, educational paths, and, in turn, different ways of thinking. In all of this, the regular meetings and collaboration blur the geographical lines, and it feels like one cohesive organization.