A 20-year journey through IT support, infrastructure, and trading systems engineering in New York City.
With much anticipation and excitement, my career in IT began in 2004 at Cablevision. The reality of the working world quickly tempered my idealist view of post-grad life โ I was doing phone support, troubleshooting internet issues, and walking customers through email setup. It was simple but challenging in a different way: I learned how to talk to non-IT people about IT problems, communicate with irate customers, and stay calm under pressure. That skill โ translating technical problems into plain language โ would prove invaluable throughout the rest of my career.
After eighteen months on the front lines of consumer support, I moved into consulting at one of New York's most powerful law firms. Our team was responsible for keeping the firm's entire network and systems infrastructure online using Nimbus โ monitoring servers, firewalls, switches, routers, and storage systems around the clock. After I joined, I wrote scripts and automated many of the manual health checks using Wintask, deploying them on virtual servers. The biggest lesson here was the importance of communication: keeping engineers, managers, and vendors informed about issues before they become crises.
While consulting at the law firm, I simultaneously worked full-time as a Systems Analyst at Thomson Financial. As part of a team of 40 analysts, we supported applications used by the financial sector globally โ 6,000+ Unix servers, Cisco routers, and devices that fed ticker data from exchanges worldwide. I led my first IT project here: a successful initiative to upgrade servers suffering from high CPU utilization.
Despite two decent jobs, I was hungry for more exposure. The opportunity came in May 2007: a small midtown startup selling price discovery software for OTC derivatives needed an engineer. I went in and was hired by the CEO on the spot. Working alongside just one other IT person, I was doing everything โ building Windows and Linux servers, racking hardware, configuring networks, writing scripts, and supporting clients directly. On-site visits, software demos, 24ร7 on-call for the data center โ all of it. This role changed how I approach IT entirely. I became proactive, fast, and outcome-oriented. Unfortunately, the 2008 credit crisis hit us hard. After Moody's acquired us, the group never recovered. We were acquired again and many of us โ including me โ were laid off.
Two months after the layoff, I joined Ullink, a FIX software company. This is where I went deep on FIX protocol and electronic trading infrastructure โ building FIX engines, establishing exchange connectivity, certifying sessions in UAT environments, and automating BAU processes on Linux platforms. It was where I truly became a FIX engineer.
At Credit Suisse I worked directly with the business โ Cash, Algo, Program, and Options trading desks โ as well as clients and vendors. I built custom FIX log reports using Bash, Perl, Awk, and Sed, and served as Global Project Lead on a cross-functional initiative that automated FIX session setups over DMZ/VPN systems. This was high-stakes, high-visibility work in a major investment bank.
Six years at Goldman Sachs as part of the GSAM technology support team. I became the primary point of contact for investment teams on all production trading environment issues. I automated reports in GS's proprietary Slang language, fixed CI/CD regressions, and mentored the next generation of support engineers. Goldman operates at a scale and speed unlike anywhere else โ it sharpened every skill I had.
Currently serving as Lead Trading Operations Engineer at Verition, a multi-strategy hedge fund. I built and continuously enhance a Python-based alerting system for trade exceptions used by L1 engineers daily. I own FIX Drop Copy and Gateway onboarding with brokers and vendors, developed an ETL pipeline for compliance reporting, and coach and develop the L1 engineering team. The combination of deep technical ownership and team leadership defines this role.
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