From Olympiad records to working lives
Explore the career roles recorded for Olympiad medalists, from software engineering and research to founding and finance.
of profiles with role titles appear in more than one of these career categories.
View data and sourcesRoles across recorded careers
Share of profiles with role titles in work history
- 01Research & academia46%
- 02Software engineering38.4%
- 03Quantitative finance11.1%
- 04Data & machine learning10.7%
- 05Founding8%
- 06Product management1%
What the records show
Explore the peopleResearch & academia is the most frequent of these categories
46% of profiles with role titles have at least one title in this category. The percentage refers to a recorded role anywhere in a person’s experience history.
Career categories are not exclusive
31.1% of profiles with role titles appear in more than one of the categories shown. This captures overlapping titles and different roles across a history; it does not establish the order of career moves.
Founding is identified in the title
8% of profiles with role titles explicitly list a founder or cofounder position. Owning a personal project or working at a startup is not, by itself, counted as founding.
Sources and chart data
Role categories are reproducible matches against title text in the matched experience records. The denominator includes profiles with at least one recorded role title. Descriptions, school names, and employer names are not used to assign a role category. These categories describe recorded work rather than predict outcomes.
The career collection contains 7,442 matched people as of 12 September 2026. The chart data includes the numerator and denominator for every percentage. Values are rounded to one decimal place.
Official competition records are linked from each profile. Education and experience come from the matched public career records linked there.
How each role category is defined
- Software engineering
- Software engineer, software developer, programmer, or related software title.
- Research & academia
- Research, scientist, professor, lecturer, faculty, or postdoctoral title.
- Founding
- Founder or cofounder appears explicitly in a recorded title.
- Quantitative finance
- Quantitative, quant, trader, or portfolio manager appears in a recorded title.
- Data & machine learning
- Data scientist, data engineer, machine learning, or AI engineer title.
- Product management
- Product manager, product lead, or head of product title.