The two reasons I said ‘yes’ to Vanguard tech

When I was first presented with an opportunity to work for Vanguard, I was already in a very fulfilling phase of my career as a software consultant and technical lead. It didn’t take me long though, to appreciate the legacy of Vanguard and how empowered crew members are. I was confident that I’d be walking into a firm where the crew is at the core of its operations, and investors at the forefront of every decision. I couldn’t be more excited to onboard and make an earnest attempt to make a difference.

From day one, I was immensely impressed with the average tenure of crew members at Vanguard – something I haven’t run into in my past engagements. It was very easy to figure out why, though. Vanguard goes above and beyond in empowering crew members and encourages them to invest in self growth through learning. Vanguard offers several learning avenues, be it certification, accreditations, or licensing, in addition to robust e-learning opportunities – not to mention the amazing comprehensive benefits that each crew member is provided. One additional distinguishing feature is the support crew members are given to rotate into different areas of the enterprise, to become more well-rounded in Vanguard’s business lines and various client experiences.

In Vanguard’s Personal Investor division, there couldn’t be a more exciting time to work in technology. We are on a mission to modernize the centerpiece of Personal Investor technology – Vanguard’s trading platform. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for application engineers to learn the intricacies of our legacy mission-critical trading platform and help transform it into a cloud-native solution. At Vanguard, we’re not just doing a lift-and-shift to the cloud – we’re rewriting our core software so we can take full advantage of the virtues of being in the cloud.

As Chief Brokerage Architect, this is extremely fulfilling work for me. For our development teams, this journey provides deep learning opportunities, such as seeing how trading systems work at their core, the different investment and advice products we offer, and what happens as the trade goes through execution, clearing, and settlement. Our team is critical to Vanguard’s launches of new products and services, which means we have a great impact on client experiences and helping investors meet their goals.

I consider myself blessed to be given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference for our firm and clients, while getting to build a highly-scalable, fault-tolerant, low-latency cloud-native trade engine that will serve Vanguard’s growth for years to come.

– Ravi A.

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