Hi, I'm Druce

I bridge the gap between business decision-making and AI engineering, and help ship production AI systems for investment management. With 30 years as a front-office quantitative analyst, hedge fund CTO, and now hands-on AI builder, including work at Tiger Management, Caxton, and as CTO of a $2B Tiger Cub fund, I help hedge funds and investment firms plan and implement AI strategy, translating modern AI capabilities into production systems that improve execution velocity, decision quality, and operational efficiency.

AI projects often struggle and fail. Key reasons include:

• Lack of business-centric framing and success metrics.
• Lack of realistic evals against business objectives.
• Misaligned expectations.
• Lack of end user or executive buy-in.
• Governance, risk, and compliance blind spots.
• Automating too little or too much, with poorly tuned human-in-the-loop dynamics.
• Agent POCs stuck in the 'messy middle' where they work 80% of the time, but not in the high 90s required for production.

I can help avoid those pitfalls.

Recent successes include:

• Designing and deploying RAG-based research summarization, text-to-SQL on CRM data, and agentic workflows for sell-side and buy-side teams.
• Architecting agent automation systems using OpenAI Agents SDK and LangGraph.
• Traditional ML for alternative data signals.

As CTO of Hoplite Capital Management (2008–2010), I was the first internal tech hire at a 25-person, $2B AUM long/short equity fund. I built a best-practice end-to-end platform, including OMS (Eze Castle), real-time P&L and portfolio analytics, FIX trading, compliance, post-trade workflows, and disaster recovery, supporting daily decision-making for PMs and analysts.

Earlier, I led hedge fund implementations at Charles River Development, and held front-office roles at Caxton and Tiger Management. I began my career at Salomon Brothers, doing economic forecasting and building portfolio optimization systems using multi-factor risk models. Awarded CFA charter 2009 (not active).

Technical focus: Python, AI-assisted full SDLC dev practices, agentic systems, LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, RAG, robust data pipelines.