Before founding SigTech at the start of 2019, Ren was the Chief Investment Officer of the Systematic Investment Group (SIG) at Brevan Howard Asset Management where he managed multiple quantitative investment funds. He started his career at Barclays Capital as an equity exotics trader managing quantitative investment strategies across all major asset classes. Before university, Ren skipped two grades in school and won three first prizes in the Chinese National Olympiads, because of which he was exempted from the Chinese National College Entrance Examination.
After earning a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the national gifted education program of Shanghai Jiaotong University, Ren was directly admitted with full scholarship to the PhD program for computer science at Cambridge University, UK. While there he researched the Xen virtual machine monitor that was chosen by Amazon as the foundation of the AWS cloud-computing platform.