Ben Wellington – Complex Feature Engineering at Two Sigma (S7E32)

My guest this episode is Ben Wellington, Head of Complex Feature Engines at Two Sigma.

In a modern quant process, one might argue that edge can live in three places: the data you can get your hands on, what you do with that data, and how you forecast from it. Ben lives squarely in the middle layer — feature generation — which also happens to be the place AI is reshaping fastest.

So that's where we spend our time. We start with what a "feature" even is, and why, as raw data gets commoditized, the edge increasingly comes from what you build out of it. Then we follow the thread running through the whole conversation: large language models. Ben has a line I keep coming back to — that anything can be language now — and we trace what that unlocks, and whether making feature creation this cheap just democratizes the edge away.

We close on what a quant starting out today should be building toward, and which skills compound most in a career where AI is the dominant tool.

Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Wellington.