KX Boston Meetup 2026

The first week of May saw FD, EPAM, and our partner KX travel to Boston for KX’s first Meetup of 2026, hosted in EPAM’s flagship Seaport office. We were welcomed by an impressive office space – a converted warehouse in the heart of Seaport dedicated to showcasing innovative designs by EPAM Continuum. There was no shortage of tech inspiration, and it was the perfect location to invite our Boston community.

I had the exciting opportunity to represent FD as one of three speakers at this event. KX’s Nick Sansone welcomed everyone to their seats and set the tone with a warm and friendly introduction.

Jianwen Luo, One Tick, was the first speaker who broke down options analytics on One Tick Cloud and made calculating Greeks at scale look easy. I hadn’t seen that many Greeks since college and had a flashback to lecture halls and theorems!

Sam Duffy, MFS, was the second speaker of the night who demonstrated how his team is using Claude Skills to manage Kubernetes for high-scale quant workflows. There was a unanimous “you can do what?!” moment from the crowd.

After two tough acts to follow, I was up next. I had the unconventional approach of no deck nor demo, but rather the goal of conducting a room-wide conversation sparking discussions in the space of market volatility, kdb+ robustness, AI cognitive processing, and surveillance use cases. I set the topic and then engaged with the audience to hear their thoughts. I spoke to students self-learning kdb who could attest to the high performant nature of kdb after building their own tick capture systems and comparing to other technologies with realtime data. I turned to an AI company developing the world’s leading OLCP database to speak on a very interesting surveillance use case where we learned how to shine the light on dark data, and how to get value from unstructured data rapidly using cognitive processing. This is particularly useful in the space of wealth management which nicely led me to my next discussion with FD’s Kent Devolin about his experience on the ground as a business analyst exploring the appetite for AI in the world of wealth management right now.

The audience participation made my job easy and with that, it was time to continue these conversations over food and drinks during the networking reception. This was the real proof of a successful event in Boston with everyone making plans to collaborate or meet at upcoming events. As a big fan of Good Will Hunting, it was brilliant to have students from all over Massachusetts in the room showcasing their talents and eager to learn from everyone – a reminder of what these events are all about!

I’m writing this review while travelling back on the Amtrak train to NYC feeling very grateful for the opportunity. A big shoutout goes to the FD team who joined me in Boston – Victoria Shanks, Henry Lamb and Kent Devolin, to EPAM for hosting, and to KX for inviting me to speak – thank you!

Thanks
Leah