HRT Cover Letter

Roshan Taneja rtaneja@berkeley.edu · 650-660-1901 · github.com/roshantaneja · roshan.codes

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Dear Hudson River Trading Recruiting Team,

I'm a first-year EECS student at UC Berkeley applying for the Software Engineering Summer Internship. I love building systems where performance and correctness actually matter, be a data pipeline ingesting millions of voter registration records or firmware running on a rocket's avionics board at 30,000 feet. HRT's engineering culture, where code is the product, is the environment I want to work in.

At the Statewide Database at UC Berkeley, I built an end-to-end voter registration ingestion pipeline using Dagster, DuckDB, and Pydantic — handling multi-format files with automated schema validation, geographic tagging, and fault-tolerant loading. The work sharpened my instincts around data integrity at scale: designing systems that fail loudly and recover gracefully, which I imagine maps closely to the reliability demands of trading infrastructure.

I also write low-level code that has to work under real constraints. As an avionics engineer for Cal STAR, I develop ESP32 firmware in C++ for custom PCBs on high-power rockets, integrating sensor fusion and telemetry systems under strict mass and power budgets. Separately, my ML research — a TensorFlow pipeline processing 10,000+ satellite image tiles over hundreds of square miles — taught me to think carefully about computational efficiency when the dataset won't fit in memory and the results drive real deployment decisions.

What draws me to HRT specifically is the combination of technical depth and intellectual openness. I'm someone who moves across domains — embedded systems, data engineering, machine learning, geospatial analysis — and I do my best work in environments that reward curiosity over specialization. I write Python and C++ daily, I maintain a competitive programming archive, and I genuinely enjoy making code not just functional but clean and fast.

I'd welcome the chance to contribute to HRT's engineering infrastructure this summer. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, Roshan Taneja