I wrote my first line of code at eight years old and never looked back. I started on an 8-bit home computer and went on to study Computer Science through school and university. Initially, I assumed I would work in the aerospace industry or the wider technology sector. It was only after a conversation with a fellow student, who had interned at a different financial institution that I realised the sheer breadth of the problem space and the opportunities that banking and finance present for engineering.

Building an office from day one is a once-in-a-career opportunity. After working in the London and Tokyo offices of Goldman Sachs, the attraction of moving to the Birmingham office when it first opened was the challenge of being part of the leadership team, growing an office and a community from inception to where it stands today, five years later.

Finance sounds simple in theory, engineering it at scale is anything but. There are many aspects of finance that can appear straightforward when explained in concept, but to actually implement them as systems and processes — in a reliable, fast, and scalable way — is far from simple and often exceptionally complex. So much of our engineering focus is on building large-scale systems that perform reliably for critical business functions such as trading and risk management, while ensuring those systems cover all the nuances and edge cases needed to provide a competitive advantage across the international markets and global jurisdictions the firm covers. Managing and continually reducing the complexity of platforms, even as they increase in sophistication and capability, is a very important and continuous effort, it is what allows us to retain the flexibility and nimbleness to meet new business demands.

Twenty-five years in, and every university course has earned its place. I studied Computer Science at university, covering programming, networks, data structures, encryption, mathematics, and algorithms. During my career at Goldman Sachs, I have applied the learning from every single course in some way to solve a business problem. Increasingly, complex business challenges require combining engineering with other disciplines. For example, I was in Japan during the 2011 earthquake, which disrupted undersea network data cables. As a platform owner, I needed to work with experts in seismology, geography, legal, and networking to re-route our network traffic through alternate continents back to Europe and the US. Moments like these remind you that engineering in financial services is never just about writing code, it is about solving real problems under real constraints, and that is what makes it endlessly rewarding.