Hi, I'm
Quincy Karns
New York, NY
About
A bit about me
I graduated from USC's Viterbi School of Engineering with a B.S. in Computer Science and Business Administration, with coursework in Financial Derivatives, Advanced Finance, and Applied Statistics.
I'm currently a Technology Strategy consultant at PwC's Strategy& practice in New York City, advising private equity firms on tech due diligence and value creation. Before that, I was a software engineer at Microsoft, building performance-critical systems in C++ on the Teams platform.
I'm now pursuing a role in Sales & Trading, where I can apply quantitative thinking, a systems mindset, and a genuine interest in how markets work. That interest isn't just academic since I've been an avid poker player for years, growing a considerable bankroll by applying probability, expected value, and disciplined risk management.
I'm currently building finance-focused projects to learn more about how markets work and develop a stronger hands-on understanding of the field.
Experience
Where I've worked
- Supported 10+ technology due diligence and value creation projects for private equity firms, analyzing product positioning, revenue drivers, and technology infrastructure to assess investment risk.
- Built financial sensitivity analyses to evaluate margin expansion opportunities and downside exposure.
- Identified $10M+ in operational bottlenecks across multiple diligence processes in the technology sector.
- Led development of a performance-critical feature within Microsoft Teams supporting 1M+ daily calls, reducing transfer time by 20% and improving call success rates by 15%.
- Built automated test framework (50+ tests) to stress-test edge cases and improve system stability under peak usage.
- Partnered with product and engineering leads to prioritize feature rollout based on user impact and operational risk.
- Selected as 1 of 50 out of 2,700+ applicants to join the innovation academy and explore the full product lifecycle.
- Built a full-stack personal styling web application using ReactJS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap.
- Implemented a backend decision engine in Express.js integrating OpenAI APIs, increasing user engagement by 50%.
Projects
What I'm building
Currently building out finance-focused projects. Check back soon — links will be added as work is completed and published to GitHub.
Options Pricing Model
In progress — implementing Black-Scholes and binomial tree pricing models in Python with an interactive payoff visualizer.
Algorithmic Trading Backtest
Planned — backtesting a momentum-based equity strategy using historical market data. Will include performance metrics (Sharpe, max drawdown).
Market Data Dashboard
Planned — a real-time dashboard pulling live price data and displaying technical indicators. Leveraging C++ for data processing.