Robin Christopher Yu

I'm a software engineer passionate about optimizing low-level systems. As a competitive programmer, I won three medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics and wrote problems for international competitions with thousands of participants. These days I work on the performance of ultra-low latency storage for Google's Compute Engine.I also love word puzzles and am a published crossword constructor at The New York Times.

Notes9

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. Two independent source families corroborate an actual employer role at a quantitative proprietary trading firm: (1) the LinkedIn-derived profile indexed for this task (index-only, not primary) lists 'Software Engineer at Jump Trading LLC' (Singapore), described as writing a C++ gateway to connect traders to MCX, an Indian commodity exchange, and giving dates of 2021 (the caller-provided lead states May-Jul 2021); (2) the public LinkedIn profile at linkedin.com/in/robincyu, in its own text, states he is/was a Software Engineer whose role history includes Jump Trading. Identity is supported: the same LinkedIn profile carries his IOI 2015/2016/2017 Philippines medal record and his NYT crossword bio. Employer classification: Jump Trading LLC is a proprietary high-frequency/algorithmic trading firm, so this is genuine quantitative-trading employment, not a name match. Caveat: the exact months and the index-only description are not independently confirmed by a non-LinkedIn primary source; the public LinkedIn page is the primary source for the role existing, the index supplies the detail. No other quant-finance employer (bank, asset manager, energy or crypto trading firm) appears in his history; Shopee (e-commerce) and Google (cloud infrastructure) are not quantitative-finance employers. Student/competition activity (IOI, NOI.SG, ICPC) is excluded as it is not employment.Sep 17, 2026
• Held a 2021 Software Engineer role at Jump Trading LLC in Singapore, writing a C++ exchange-connectivity gateway to MCX (Multi Commodity Exchange of India) - low-latency C++ work at a quantitative trading firm, bridging his competitive-programming systems background into trading infrastructure.Jul 1, 2021
• Won the Philippines' first-ever IOI medal: bronze at IOI 2015 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, while a student at Xavier School - the country had only begun sending IOI teams the year before, so the medal established the benchmark the later Philippine teams followed.Sep 12, 2015
• Moved to Google as a Software Engineer (2026-), optimizing ultra-low-latency/high-performance block storage for Google Compute Engine in C++ - a return to the low-level systems work the LinkedIn summary names as his focus.Jan 1, 2026
• IOI 2017 silver medal (rank 35, 322.02/600) in Tehran - his best IOI result, capping three consecutive medal years for the Philippines.Aug 4, 2017
• Public handles consolidate to one identity: LinkedIn robincyu, GitHub robincyu, HackerRank robinyu, Codeforces robinyu and X @robinyu96 - the 'robinyu' stem recurs across platforms, and the LinkedIn profile states the NYT crossword and IOI record that match the olympiad identity.Sep 17, 2026
• Joined Shopee as an Engineer (2021-2024) and was promoted to Senior Engineer (2024-2026), working on Shopee's payment systems in Go handling tens of millions of transactions daily across Southeast Asia and Latin America - a payments/transaction-processing track, not trading.Jan 1, 2024
• IOI 2016 bronze (rank 131-133, 258/600), confirming the 2015 result was repeatable rather than a one-off, and setting up the 2017 silver.Aug 19, 2016
• Published New York Times crossword constructor: two Thursday puzzles, debut 4/13/2023 and latest 8/24/2023, which the LinkedIn summary itself cites ('published crossword constructor at The New York Times').Aug 24, 2023
• The Jump Trading stint (2021) sits between his time as a Shopee Engineer and his return to low-level C++ work at Google, suggesting a brief, targeted move into trading infrastructure rather than a long trading career; the index-only source limits certainty on duration (lead says May-Jul 2021).Jul 1, 2021
• Studied Computer Science at the National University of Singapore 2017-2021, relocating from Xavier School (Manila) to Singapore after his IOI 2017 silver.Jan 1, 2021
• Gold medal at the 20th Singapore National Olympiad in Informatics (March 2017), 5th overall and 3rd among foreign competitors - a Singapore-hosted win that preceded his move to NUS in Singapore later that year.Mar 19, 2017