How it started

Back in 2010, I got hired at Calypso Technology in San Francisco as a junior software engineer. At that time, I was just out of school, having graduated with a master's degree in software engineering from EPITA. My total experience was a year's worth of internships.

After living in New Caledonia, France and India, this was my time to discover a new country, and I was excited about it, having already planned my staying with American roommates.

The position was going to be a challenge, and I was ready for it. I wasn't afraid of tackling a massive codebase, and understanding complex systems, since EPITA prepared me very well for it. However, learning finance was the most significant difficulty since I never got any formal training in it.

I didn't know it yet, but I was engaging myself in a life-changing experience !

A quick review

I spent four years working on a risk analysis software used by the middle office of financial institutions like private banks or hedge funds. It was a fantastic experience that was, at times, frustrating and, at times, rewarding. 

I mainly worked on tasks for most of my first year, which isn't the most exciting part of software engineering, but you have to start somewhere. It was a great way to get familiar with the codebase, which was massive, with several thousand java classes. In order to stop going around and asking questions all the time, or lost myself into too much details, I decided to treat all assignments from a specific subsystem at once before exploring another one. When I started, I visualized Calypso as one giant black box, getting info in and info out, and the more I was investigating bugs and exploring the system, the smaller the black box was getting.

In the second year, I was transitioning out of a junior engineer position, and I was getting assigned more critical incidents to investigate and close, and the development of brand new features. 

In the third and fourth years, the senior engineer who mentored me left, and a new intern was hired and mentored by me. I had many new features to release that were much more complex and involved several teams with different skills. Since my engineering manager wasn't always available to assist me, I had to up my communication skills and figure out a lot of stuff by myself. The critical incidents I was being assigned were getting also more complex to investigate, and with your client being in another country and your helpdesk in another one, I really had to be precise in my communication. Otherwise, I could quickly go over the time limit allocated to close the incident.

Overall, the experience was great. I will never forget my first manager, who taught me the basis of software engineering in practice. I will forever be grateful for having the opportunity to start my career in such a prestigious city.