Meet Clear Street’s Emerging Engineering Talent

The Clear Street team is bringing capital markets into the future, processing more than $3 billion in trades every day, all on a platform we built in just three years. This means combining top talent from some of the most competitive companies on Wall Street and Silicon Valley to create a workforce that is diverse in ideas, cultures, and experiences.

We sat down with some of our early career engineering staff to learn more about their projects, passions, and what makes Clear Street a great place to work for them.

Which project are you most proud of?

We recently updated our core transaction processing system, which hydrates the ledger for all trades at Clear Street. It was an all-hands-on deck effort to build the new system and handle the crossover.

I conceptualized and designed a workflow within the system, working closely with other engineers and the Clearing Operations team to understand the downstream implications. Since launch, I’ve been responsible for adding new features and functionality, as well as maintenance. Diving into building and maintaining our central processing engine taught me so much about how big distributed systems work and the design principles that shape them.

I also have the chance to contribute to ad-hoc projects, and have my hands in a few different workstreams at the same time. This gives me a better understanding of what’s happening across Clear Street and lets me collaborate with and learn from the senior engineers.

What sets Clear Street apart?

The Silicon Valley spirit at a Wall Street company blew my mind. It’s rare for a new graduate to be building impactful services from scratch, but Clear Street allows me that responsibility. I’ve been given opportunities to both sharpen my tech skills and my leadership experience through presentations, communication, and mentorship.

There’s a clear engineering leadership ascension, and my career goal is to focus on building my technology skills and becoming an engineering leader. It’s a collaborative environment where people are always sharing their knowledge about new and exciting technologies.

The effort we put into constantly updating our tech stack never fails to impress me. We use the latest available technology and a variety of open source tooling to build products that age exceptionally well. When I joined, we were using Grafana for our metrics, and we’ve since moved to Datadog. I also witnessed the transition to our new transaction processing system, which is so impressive because we process on average more than $3 billion in daily trading volume.

For me, this is the key differentiator between Clear Street and other banks. We have the ability and motivation to constantly update our technology and services to stay ahead of the curve. Working in this kind of environment and being exposed to so many different systems changes the way you think about problems.

How would you describe Clear Street’s culture?

When I joined Clear Street, I was the first individual contributor on our Risk Engineering team, which has since grown to a group of 10. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the team grow, as well as playing a role in developing the team’s culture and engineering standard. I’m proud of our work processes, communication, and dedication to the company mission — all of this has helped us become a high-functioning team.

Our team’s function is to ingest and analyze trade processing data to monitor firm and client risks. I’ve been able to play a large role in designing, building, testing, and launching our real-time risk pipelines. Whether it’s through my technical contributions, like designing and building systems, or through challenging existing processes and communicating with stakeholders, I have a significant impact at Clear Street outside of simply writing code.

Our top priority is our people, and we’re proud to be recognized as a Great Place to Work and one of FORTUNE’s Best Workplaces in New York. We’re hiring across role types and experience levels. If you think you’d make a great addition to our team and culture, we invite you to apply here.