Siavosh Benabbas

Siavosh Benabbas is a software engineer at Google (Staff Software Engineer per the LinkedIn index, New York area). He represented Iran at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002, winning bronze, and later competed in the ICPC World Finals in 2006. He holds a BSc in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where his dissertation under Toniann Pitassi covered strong SDP relaxations for combinatorial optimization. From 2012 to 2017 he worked as a Quantitative Strategist at Tradeworx, a New Jersey firm running an equity market-neutral hedge fund and high-frequency proprietary trading business, before moving into software engineering at Google.

Notes9

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. LinkedIn-enrichment (index) lists a Quantitative Strategist role at Tradeworx 2012-2017 (5 yrs); his own University of Toronto homepage states verbatim 'As of November 2012 I am a Quantitative Strategist at Tradeworx', corroborating the role and its start from a primary first-person source. Tradeworx (tradeworx.com) is a Red Bank, NJ financial-technology firm describing itself as operating an equity market-neutral hedge fund and a high-frequency proprietary trading business - genuine quantitative finance, not a name-only 'quant' company. Identity supported by convergence of the Toronto CS homepage, Mathematics Genealogy (PhD Toronto 2012), IOI statistics and LinkedIn. CONFIRMED: a real quantitative-strategy role at a real quant/HFT firm.Nov 2012
• Identity convergence: the LinkedIn profile (Staff SWE at Google, University of Toronto), his own cs.toronto.edu/~siavosh homepage 'Homepage of Siavosh Benabbas', Mathematics Genealogy entry (PhD Toronto 2012, id 183644), and IOI/CPHOF statistics (Iran, IOI 2002) all describe one person - the same PhD institution, dissertation field and Iran origin line up, so the olympiad, academic and industry records are the same individual.2012
• Transitioned from a five-year quantitative-finance role at Tradeworx (ending 2017) into software engineering at Google, where the LinkedIn index places him as Senior Software Engineer from 2017 and Staff Software Engineer from 2020 - a theorist/quant moving into large-scale software.2017
• PhD in Computer Science, University of Toronto (2012), supervisor Toniann Pitassi; dissertation 'On hierarchies of strong SDP relaxations for combinatorial optimization problems'. Research area: theoretical computer science - combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, complexity, LP/SDP integrality gaps.2012
• Co-authored 'Better Balance by Being Biased: A 0.8776-Approximation for Max Bisection' (with Per Austrin and Konstantinos Georgiou), presented at SODA 2013 and later published in ACM Transactions on Algorithms; the work is still cited in the approximation-algorithms literature.2013
• Co-authored 'Verifiable Delegation of Computation over Large Datasets' (with Rosario Gennaro and Yevgeniy Vahlis) at CRYPTO 2011 - a cryptography paper on outsourced-computation verification, a distinct line from his optimization work.2011
• Won a bronze medal for Iran at IOI 2002 (rank 102/276, score 177); also competed at the ICPC World Finals in 2006, which brackets a six-year competitive-programming career spanning high school in Iran and undergraduate study.Aug 25, 2002
• Graduate trajectory at Toronto: MSc in Computer Science 2006-2008, then PhD 2008-2012 under Toniann Pitassi, moving from coursework into theory research on SDP integrality gaps.2012
• Gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in November 2011 on 'An Isoperimetric Inequality for the Hamming Cube and Applications for Integrality Gaps' - a research-seminar venue, consistent with his theoretical-CS PhD period.Nov 21, 2011
• Undergraduate degree: BSc in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2002-2006), the standard next step for Iran's top informatics-olympiad cohort; he then moved directly to the University of Toronto for graduate work.2006
• ClickHouse/LinkedIn index lists his current title as Staff Software Engineer at Google with a New York-area location, while the LinkedIn profile headline and location field still read 'San Francisco Bay Area'; treat the Google role as index-sourced and the current city as uncertain.2026
• Outside work he is an active rock climber in the San Francisco Bay Area, posting in Bay Area Climbing Partners and Movement Sunnyvale partner boards - minor corroborating evidence that he is based in the Bay Area (past or present) rather than only New York.2021