Saksham Arora
Known online as nerfsaksham. Website: saksham.digital.
Saksham Arora is a data scientist & quant researcher from India. He goes by nerfsaksham on GitHub, X, Hugging Face, YouTube, Instagram, npm and Topmate, and publishes at saksham.digital.
I am a data scientist and quant researcher from India, studying at IIT Madras (Online BS, Programming and Data Science). I build ML pipelines, quantitative trading models, and data-driven systems, and placed top ~0.8% globally at IMC Prosperity 4 out of 18,800+ teams. I also have a systems engineering background in low-latency C++ (lock-free data structures, HFT-style matching engines). I care about rigorous analysis, market microstructure, and tools that do one job extremely well.
Education and experience
B.S. Student, Data Science, IIT Madras
Enrolled in the IIT Madras Online BS programme in Programming and Data Science. Studying algorithms, data structures, statistics, and systems programming alongside real-world projects.
B.Tech Student, Computer Science & Engineering, GGSIPU
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering at Akhilesh Das Gupta Institute of Professional Studies, alongside the IIT Madras BS.
Data Engineering & Automation Intern, Cimplifie Tech Solutions
Building ETL pipelines and automation tools that cut manual data scraping by 70%. Working on data extraction, transformation, and pipeline orchestration for production systems.
Systems Engineer, Personal Project: HFT Matching Engine
Built a high-performance HFT matching engine in C++ achieving 2.7M operations per second with p99 latency of 900ns, a 3.31x improvement over a mutex baseline. Implemented lock-free data structures and a full order book.
Finalist, NASA Space Apps Challenge
Built orbit-ops, a forecasting tool, as a finalist entry in NASA's global Space Apps Challenge.
Quantitative Trader, IMC Prosperity 4
Competed in IMC Prosperity 4 trading competition against 18,800+ teams globally. Built algorithmic trading strategies across multiple rounds, finishing overall rank 154 (top ~0.8%).
Quantitative Researcher, AlphaNova Global Quant Competition 5
Finished rank 6 of 6,000+ registered data scientists. One of fewer than 160 signals to clear AlphaNova's full overfitting, look-ahead-bias, and correlation gauntlet. Featured in AlphaNova's official writeup.
Winner, GenAI Hackathon (Paytm)
Led the multi-agent FastAPI backend (6-agent orchestration, 28 endpoints) for CommuneOS, an AI-native community operating system, built in 48 hours.
Winner, Elastic x Google Cloud Hacknight, Delhi
Built Vayu Watch, a real-time Delhi air quality and public health platform on live DPCC/CPCB ground station data, with Gemini-generated personalized advisories and an Elasticsearch-indexed live history.
Data Science Intern, Airtel Xtelify
Data science internship at one of India's largest telecom operators. Building a recommendation system on PySpark pipelines over large-scale subscriber data, plus FastAPI services for the recommendation infrastructure.
AI Engineer Intern, Tieout
AI engineering internship at Tieout, an agentic-AI startup automating specialized financial audits (Employee Benefit Plan audits) for CPA firms.
Selected Attendee, OpenAI DevDay 2026
Invited to OpenAI's annual invitation-only developer conference, selected from a global applicant pool.
Selected projects
HFT Matching Engine
High-performance limit order book engine achieving 2.7M ops/sec with p99 latency of 900ns, a 3.31x improvement over a mutex baseline. Implements price-time priority matching, lock-free SPSC ring buffer, and 21 correctness tests.
IMC Prosperity 4
Placed top ~0.8% globally (overall rank 154) out of 18,800+ teams in IMC Prosperity 4. Built market-making, arbitrage, and statistical arbitrage strategies across multiple trading instruments under live competition conditions.
gitrade
A live 3-ticker exchange engine that runs entirely inside a GitHub README. Features a real limit order book, 10 live SVG charts, trade history, and a leaderboard dashboard on GitHub Pages.
qrscholes
A complete Black-Scholes options pricer (call/put pricing, Greeks, implied vol) compressed into 731 bytes and encoded in a single scannable QR code. A study in minimal, dense code.
llm-bench
Multi-provider LLM inference benchmarker measuring TTFT, inter-token latency (p50/p95/p99), and throughput across Groq, Anthropic, and OpenAI APIs. Streaming support, compare mode, 28/28 tests passing.
IICPC Benchmarking Platform
Sandboxed multi-engine HFT benchmarking platform with multiplicative scoring (correctness x completeness x speed) and 9 anti-cheat validators. Diagnosed a TCP_NODELAY omission in own engine, yielding 27x peak throughput gain. GCP Terraform IaC, 25/25 tests.
OrbitOps
Rebuilt a broken hackathon demo into a production air quality tracker. Real-time AQI, PM2.5, NO2, O3 data via Open-Meteo for any city worldwide. Serverless FastAPI on Vercel, per-request Random Forest (80 trees) trained on 7-day historical window with 6h PM2.5 forecast and 80% confidence intervals. Supabase auth.
LMEX
The LLM Latency Exchange. Free-tier LLM APIs trade as tickers where price is TTFT p99, down is good. A live market view of which providers are actually fast today.
one-nanosecond
1 pixel = 1 nanosecond. Scroll from a CPU cycle to a REST call, 50 km straight down. A scale model of latency that makes you feel how slow the network really is.
beat-the-book
You are the matching engine. Match incoming orders by hand for 60 seconds, then watch the real engine do your entire shift in microseconds. A game about humility.
CommuneOS
An AI community operating system built in 48 hours, events, AI concierge, payments, governance. Won the Paytm hackathon. I built the backend.
Sandbox Lab
Four browser sandboxes about emergence: an A-Life petri dish with neural-network brains, a gravity-warping n-body playground, a chaos-attractor synthesizer, and a self-assembling biosphere. Play god four different ways.
Verified profiles
- GitHubgithub.com/saksham10arora-dotcom
- GitHub (alt)github.com/nerfsaksham
- LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/saksham-arora10
- Xx.com/nerfsaksham
- Hugging Facehuggingface.co/nerfsaksham
- YouTubewww.youtube.com/@nerfsaksham
- Instagramwww.instagram.com/nerfsaksham/
- Topmatetopmate.io/nerfsaksham
- npmwww.npmjs.com/~nerfsaksham
- Blogblog.saksham.digital
- LeetCodeleetcode.com/u/C0SBYYY/
- Codeforcescodeforces.com/profile/C0SBYYY
- CodeChefwww.codechef.com/users/c0sbyyy
- Emailsaksham10arora@gmail.com
In a terminal
npx saksham-arora opens an interactive card. curl saksham.digital returns the same thing as text.