My official capacity on the Platform Engineering team is that of a Platform Architect. My day-to-day activities involve finding, understanding, and solving problems that teams have with building and deploying applications locally and in the cloud.

Specifically, during the analysis and design phase, I meet with individuals across all levels of our technology organization - from the CIO to interns - to determine the scope of the issue, evaluate what tools are impacted by the request, and understand the business requirements including budget and timeliness. During the implementation phase, I work with other members of the Platform Engineering team to build, test, and deploy the solution to our automation platform.

The thing I enjoy most about being on the Platform Engineering team is that we are at the forefront of new technology being deployed at our company. Our team was founded to figure out the complexities of running and deploying workloads in the cloud. This means that I’m constantly having to learn and experiment with technologies that no one else in the firm has used. At the organizational level, what I appreciate most about CME Group is that there are a diverse amount of technology problems that need to be solved. For example, the constraints that a CME Globex developer deals with are completely different than what a developer in our Regulatory team would have to solve. Furthermore, the challenges that I encounter on the Platform Engineering team are completely different than on other dev teams. This diversity of challenges, and more importantly the commitment that the firm has made to evolving roles and teams to continue transforming the business through technology is something that I highly value.