Meet a Software Engineer

Meet a Software Engineer

What inspired you to choose this career path?

I was originally inspired by robotics. In middle school, my friend convinced me to join the Lego robotics team. I loved it, and continued robotics in high school. I also joined the programming team. I had never programmed outside of drag-and-drop Lego programming before, so I started out by helping with the logic part, picking up programming languages as we went. I knew I wanted to be either an engineer or a computer scientist. I ended up doing both in college, though towards the end, I found myself focusing more on computer science.

This year, I’m returning to my robotics roots! I’ll be mentoring a high school robotics club at a local school this fall. I’m really excited to work with the students and hopefully inspire them to pursue a career in technology, too.

Take us through your journey at SIG. How have the problems you’ve been solving changed as you got closer to “the business?”

In my first year, I started working on trader-facing UI applications, often putting myself in the mind of a trader: if I were trading, how would I expect this feature to work? How useful would this new feature be? The traders use these front-end applications on a daily basis, and it was great to see my application up on their screens on my way to my desk.

As I grew, I took on new responsibilities. I became lead developer on a few applications, and worked more closely with traders. After a while, I realized I wanted to change up my focus and get closer to strategy development. I discussed my goals with my manager, and when a role opened up, he advocated for me. In my new role, I started working on a project that helps our Quantitative Research team implement trading strategies. Sometimes this works perfectly, and sometimes you get feedback like, this changed and we’re not sure why. It’s definitely a fulfilling role and what I wanted to work towards.