​Friday Hacks #277: Evolutionary Coding Agents and High-Performance Trading Systems

​​Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share about their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, here are our speakers:

​​1) OpenEvolve: Towards Open Evolutionary Agents 

​OpenEvolve is an open-source evolutionary coding agent that democratizes algorithmic discovery by combining LLMs with evolutionary computation. Our research demonstrates remarkable achievements: replicating AlphaEvolve's mathematical optimization results, discovering GPU kernel optimizations with 12.5% performance improvements for transformer attention, and achieving 2.04x speedups on algorithm benchmarks. Surprisingly, open models like Gemma 3 27B and Qwen3-Coder rival proprietary alternatives, proving that cutting-edge evolutionary AI capabilities can be accessible to everyone. This talk presents our journey towards truly open evolutionary agents for automated algorithm discovery.

​​Speakers Profile 🎙️️

​Dr. Asankhaya Sharma is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Patched.codes (YC S24), a deep-tech startup building open-source workflow automation that revolutionizes software security through AI-powered code fixes. He is also the Founder of Securade.ai, a tech4good venture preventing workplace accidents through generative AI video analytics.

​Dr. Sharma is pioneering inference-time compute techniques through his creation of OptiLLM and OpenEvolve, helping define a new category in AI infrastructure that dramatically improves LLM reasoning capabilities. He is a well-known technology expert, author, investor, and public speaker with close to two decades of experience in research and product development.

​Dr. Sharma has a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore and has been an Adjunct Professor at the Singapore Management University and the Singapore Institute of Technology.

​​2) Sequencers, Speed and the Strategic Life of an Order

​This talk will take you inside the core of a high-performance trading system, following an order’s journey from the moment a strategy decides to trade to the instant that order reaches the market, and the execution report returns. We’ll unpack the sequencer architecture that enforces determinism, the risk and routing layers that run in the fast path, and the mechanisms that ensure scalability, reliability, and recoverability under extreme load. Attendees will get a clear, step-by-step view of how a production-grade system achieves predictable microsecond-level latency without sacrificing correctness.

​​Speakers Profile 🎙️️

​Dr. Bogdan Tudor is a Senior Software Engineer and Managing Director, Virtu Financial Singapore.

​Dr. Bogdan has a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore.