Radu Mihaescu started his quantitative trading career at Knight Capital Group in 2009, and served as Head of Quantitative Trading Technology and Monetization for the customer trading group and technical lead for the firm’s largest on exchange market making strategy, as well as Knight Link, the first single dealer platform in US Equities. Following the acquisition of KCG by Virtu Financial, Radu served as the head of the Customer Market Making Group, managing all of Virtu’s US Equities principal customer trading efforts, including the flagship retail wholesaling business.
After his departure from Virtu in 2021 and until recently, Radu was a portfolio manager and Head of US Equities at a stealth quantitative trading firm. He will be rejoining Virtu Financial in February 2026, focusing on the company’s next generation quant trading platform.
Radu completed his PhD program in the Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley, under the joint supervision of professors Lior Pachter and Satish Rao. His graduate work focused on developing fast algorithms and statistical tools for computational biology, primarily in the problems of phylogeny reconstruction and sequence alignment. His research efforts also included discrete algorithms, probability theory, graph theory, language processing and mathematical finance.
Radu’s academic awards include: Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize for best applied mathematics research across all UC Berkeley departments, the National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, four top 25 finishes at the WL Putnam National Mathematical Competition (highest rank of 7th), as well as gold, silver and bronze medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad (as a member of the Romanian team).
