What I've been working on

You should not treat this page as a resume. If you want that, email me at oliverthehayman@gmail.com.

I currently work as a quant on the energy options market-making desk at DRW Holdings. I focus mostly on signal research and developing / managing our automated trading systems, and am legally obligated to not say much more.

My current interests outside of work are:

  • Machine learning, and AI alignment
  • The design and development of states and empires
  • Organizing cool stuff

Probably in that order?

I really like working on personal projects! Some recent ones I’m proud of are:

  • I’m currently working on building tooling around the chrome extension Curius, which many of my friends use to link each other articles. I am currently working on making a CLI for exploring its user graph.
  • In June 2025 I cofounded and co-organized the inaugural Second Order Retreat, a series of retreats for economics researchers in Europe.
  • From 2023 - 2025, I was part of the admissions committee for SPARC, a rationality camp for highschoolers. I lead this committee in 2023-2024 and designed its reviewing software once airtable got too greedy.
  • I was president of Oxford’s AI safety society from 2023 to 2024.
  • I also organized and lead an ML bootcamp in Oxford for software engineers.
  • I published a reinforcement learning paper about preventing reward hacking. Check out this blog post!
  • I worked on mechanistic interpretability of Go-playing models at Redwood Research in early 2023