Shivam Verma

Shivam Verma

SWE Intern @ Optiver | CS @ IIT Delhi

Experience

Optiver

Teaching Assistant: Operating Systems

Teaching Assistant: Cloud Computing

Silence Laboratories

Optiver

In the first week of the internship, we had trading theory classes where we were taught about options, ETFs, the Black-Scholes model, and other relevant topics. We also participated in market-making games with other co-interns and the trainers.

The second week focused on an introduction to Optiver’s internal tech stack. There were various lectures covering topics such as unit testing, deploying, efficient coding practices, and more. As an exercise, we were tasked with implementing a dummy PNL calculator in both C++ and Python using Optiver’s internal libraries.

The project phase started from the third week onwards, with each intern assigned to a specific tech team. I was part of the Auto Trading Risk Team.

Each office at Optiver has a panic server that ensures they maintain proper control in the markets they are trading on. Whenever something goes wrong, the panic server is invoked, halting all trading in a particular market.

With the convergence of the tech stack between the Amsterdam and US offices, synchronization was required between their panic servers. My project was to synchronize the panic states between these servers for the EuroNext Derivatives market.

To achieve this, I developed a C++ component from scratch that connected to both servers and synchronized their states. Whenever a panic was invoked in one office, the other office would automatically enter a panic state as well.

After implementing the component, I also unit-tested various parts of it to ensure correctness. Finally, in the last week of the internship, we deployed it to the production server.

Overall, it was a really nice experience at Optiver. I got to meet so many amazing people and learned a lot during those 8 weeks.

Teaching Assistant: Operating Systems (COL331)

I am currently a teaching assistant for the course Operating Systems, taught by Professor Smruti R. Sarangi.

Teaching Assistant: Cloud Computing (COL733)

I was a teaching assistant for the course Cloud Computing Technology Fundamentals, taught by Professor Abhilash Jindal.

As a teaching assistant, I was involved in designing quizzes and assignments for the course.

One of my favorite assignments was implementing the Chandy-Lamport Algorithm in a Flink-like setting for consistent global checkpointing of the system. These checkpoints were then used to recover from worker failures. The assignment can be accessed here.

Silence Laboratories

Silence Laboratories is a cryptography-focused startup in Singapore specializing in secure computations. They partner with various wallet companies to provide secure multi-party-based libraries for distributed key generation and signing.

During my internship, my task was to experiment with different decentralized communication libraries such as Waku and Wallet Connect. I integrated these libraries into dummy browser crypto wallets to enable decentralized communication among the wallets.

Some details of the work we did can be found in this talk given at DeCompute.