Widagdo Setiawan

Widagdo Setiawan is an engineer and physicist. He represented Indonesia at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2001 (bronze) and 2002 (silver), then studied physics and computer science at MIT (BA) and earned a PhD in physics at Harvard (thesis 'Fermi Gas Microscope', 2013), publishing on site-resolved imaging of fermionic lithium in Physical Review Letters. After his PhD he worked as a Quant Trader at Getco (Chicago, 2012-2013) and as a Software Engineer at Avalon Trading (2014-2016), then led engineering at Tetracube Technologies building low-latency trading hardware and platforms. He subsequently worked at Facebook (Gorilla time-series database) and Tesla (data pipelines), and is currently Chief Architect at Tarro, a restaurant technology company. Employment history is from his LinkedIn profile (index-only) and independently corroborated for the Getco period by his Harvard lab page.

Notes9

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. He held an actual paid role as 'Quant Trader' at Getco (Chicago), 2012-2013 (LinkedIn/employer index), a period independently corroborated by his Harvard Greiner Lab page stating 'Now working for GETCO'. Getco (Global Electronic Trading Company) is independently classified as a high-frequency trading and electronic market-making firm (Wikipedia). He also worked as a Software Engineer at Avalon Trading (2014-2016), described as building an algorithmic trading platform for the CME exchange. Identity is supported by the coherent IOI/Harvard-PhD/MIT-physics backbone and the Harvard lab page cross-link. Student programs alone were not relied upon; both are substantive employment roles. Caveat: the Getco/Avalon role details are index/self-described (LinkedIn) and not confirmed by an employer-side primary source.2013
• Employer classification - Getco: Wikipedia describes the Global Electronic Trading Company (GETCO) as an American high-frequency trading and electronic market-making firm based in Chicago, later folded into KCG Holdings. This confirms it is a genuine quantitative/HFT trading employer, so the 'Quant Trader' title there is a real quant-finance role.2013
• Career timeline after the PhD: Quant Trader at Getco (2012-2013) -> Software Engineer at Avalon Trading (2014-2016, Chicago) -> Engineering Manager/Lead Developer at Tetracube Technologies (2016-2019) -> Software Engineer at Facebook (2020-2021, Gorilla time-series database) -> Staff Software Engineer at Tesla (2021-2023) -> Chief Architect at Tarro (2023-present). The trading phase sits immediately after the Harvard PhD and before a move into big-tech data infrastructure.2023
• Harvard Greiner Lab's own page lists him as a Graduate Student (2007-2012) and states 'Now working for GETCO', which independently corroborates the Getco employment that otherwise appears only in LinkedIn-derived index data.2013
• Employer classification - Tetracube Technologies: his description says the company 'built custom network cards and trading platforms for low latency trading applications' with latency under 200 ns, i.e. low-latency trading infrastructure rather than direct trading - quant-adjacent engineering, not a fund role.2016
• Employer classification - Avalon Trading: his LinkedIn-index description says he 'built an algorithmic trading platform for the CME exchange' in the Greater Chicago Area (2014-2016), a quantitative/algorithmic trading software role. Independent primary-source confirmation of Avalon Trading's business was not located, so the quant nature rests on his own description.2014
• IOI record: Widagdo Setiawan represented Indonesia at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2001 (bronze) and 2002 (silver), per the IOI statistics database (id 2499) and the Competitive Programming Hall of Fame; the two independent olympiad records agree on country and years.2002
• Identity caveat: an Indonesian Wikipedia article describes a Widagdo Setiawan (b. 16 April 1984) as a two-time International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (2002, 2003), and a 2018 detik.com article lists 'Widagdo Setiawan' among Indonesia's 2003 APhO gold-medal physics team. The same person plausibly did both IOI and IPhO and the physics trajectory matches, but this physics-olympiad identity is NOT independently confirmed to be the IOI contestant / Tarro engineer.Jun 25, 2018
• PhD thesis 'Fermi Gas Microscope' (Harvard, 2013) on site-resolved imaging of fermionic 6Li in an optical lattice; the result was published as Physical Review Letters 114, 213002 (2015). PhD-holder plus atomic-physics publications establish the academic phase between MIT and his trading career.2015
• Cross-source: the MIT Cold Atoms (CUA) people page and the Harvard Lithium Lab page both name him as a co-author on cold-atom publications (e.g. with Maxwell Parsons, A. Mazurenko), tying the olympiad-to-physics identity to the same research lineage cited in his PhD; this strengthens the identity chain but is prior to, not part of, his quant finance roles.2015
• GitHub account 'widagdos' names 'Widagdo Setiawan' but its bio reads 'Software engineer at Wondersco' (not Tarro) and shows only 8 repos, including a 'Python API generated from TWS C++ API' wrapper for the Interactive Brokers trading API - the employer mismatch means the account is not reliably owned by the Tarro engineer, so no GitHub URL is asserted as verified.2025