Kiril Sakaliyski

Specialties: Pricing Theory of Financial Derivatives, Fluid Mechanics, Acoustics, Control and Optimization Theory

Notes8

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. Identity is triangulated independently of the index: the IMO official record (Kiril Sakaliyski, Bulgaria, silver medal, IMO 1998), the MIT DSpace thesis by 'Kiril Dimitrov Sakaliyski' (Aeroacoustics of Perforated Drag Plates, 2005), and an AIAA 2007 co-authored paper (Sakaliyski, Hileman, Spakovszky) all describe the same aerospace-trained person, matching the LinkedIn handle 'skiko' whose profile carries the alum.mit.edu/www/skiko website; the DRW employment itself rests on a LinkedIn profile (self-reported, plus an aggregator index echoing it), not an independent primary source. Employment evidence: a single continuous full-time role, Quantitative Researcher at DRW Trading Group (2006-present, ~20 years), scope described as risk-management tooling, proprietary pricing-model development and back-testing. Employer classification: DRW Holdings LLC, a Chicago proprietary trading firm founded 1992, is a genuine quantitative finance employer (systematic/proprietary trading). Role type: actual full-time employment, not an internship or student program. No internships or other quant roles were found; the Cambridge-MIT Institute Research Assistant (2003-2005) and Balkan (Bulgaria Air) aircraft/gas-turbine trainee (2001) roles are aerospace, not finance.2026
• Career is a single-employer arc: joined DRW Trading Group in 2006 straight after an M.Sc. in Financial Mathematics at the University of Chicago (2007-2009), so the degree overlapped his first two-three years at DRW rather than preceding it - a part-time/mid-career quant-finance credential, not a pre-job pipeline.2026
• Breadth of the DRW role is research-tooling rather than a desk title: the profile lists web/stand-alone risk tools, proprietary pricing models and back-testing, consistent with a quantitative-research function at a proprietary trading firm.2026
• Pre-finance identity is aerospace research: MIT M.Sc. in Aeronautics and Astronautics (2003-2005) and the 2005 thesis on perforated drag plates for quiet transport aircraft, at a time the Silent Aircraft Initiative was running at MIT/Cambridge.2005
• IMO 1998: represented Bulgaria and won a silver medal with a 24-point total (rank ~95), per the contestant results page; matches the IMO 1998 Bulgaria team listing.1998
• Co-authored AIAA paper 'Aero-Acoustics of Perforated Drag Plates for Quiet Transport Aircraft' (2007) with James Hileman and Zoltan Spakovszky, the MIT Gas Turbine Lab group - a small, durable airframe-noise research paper (cited ~25 times).2007
• B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering (1998-2002) follows directly on the Sofia High School of Mathematics (1991-1998), and the IMO 1998 silver falls in his final high-school year - the Olympiad result and the engineering degree share a mathematical foundation but the sources establish no causal link to the later finance career.1998
• Training role at Balkan (Bulgaria Air) as Aircraft Structure and Gas Turbine Engineer in 2001, i.e. a student-era aerospace placement in Bulgaria before the MIT move.2001
• DRW's external employer record lists Kiril Sakaliyski under Quantitative Research alongside ~70 other quantitative researchers/interns, corroborating the employer (aggregator-derived, echoes the LinkedIn profile rather than an independent primary document).2026
• The aerospace research carried into the MIT Turbine Lab lineage: the 2005 thesis acknowledgment chain and a related MIT compressor-stability thesis list Sakaliyski among the collaborators - an academic footprint confined to the 2003-2007 window.2005
• Public aggregator (RocketReach/ContactOut) lists Kiril Sakaliyski as Quantitative Researcher at DRW in Chicago IL, and surfaces a personal email [contact omitted]; these are directory-aggregated, not verified primary contact data.2026
• Only one LinkedIn profile matches this identity (linkedin.com/in/skiko), and the public MIT alumni site it advertises (alum.mit.edu/www/skiko) now returns 403 to automated requests, so it could not be read as an independent source.2026