FINRA

What: Built a data pipeline that ingests all publicly traded companies’ financial statements, computes various financial figures such as Net Income or Gross Profit, and publishes those figures for half-a-dozen downstream consumers.
How: Financial statements come in all different shapes according to the industry and company. To accurately extract facts and figures, I became intimately familiar with a standard called XBRL and the US Financial Standards Board recommendations.
Impact: Given a six-month deadline I was able to replace our original vendor who was the source of this data for over two decades. My pipeline had improved accuracy and higher volume of data than before, saving the company on an expensive annual contract.

What: Isolated and migrated a batch job from a soon-to-be deprecated on-prem system into AWS.
How: The old job was written across a two thousand line SQL script and three bash scripts which I teased into a set of organized SQL functions and a more reasonable Java program.
Impact: Had this system not been migrated, FINRA would be in violation of its contract with the SEC.

Aside from JHU: APL and my startup, Project Del, FINRA was my first employer out of undergrad. Around the time the startup pittered out, I created my LinkedIn profile and started receiving recruiter messages. A contracting company connected me with FINRA and the interviews started. I was young and perhaps a tad arrogant, but we made it through! One of my in-person interviews was with a Program Manager and she saw I had a double major in physics and computer science. She asked, “Do you believe in the many-worlds theory?” I responded, “We definitely didn’t study it in undergrad, but I’ve watched a lot of documentaries on the different interpretations of quantum theory and I’m not entirely convinced yet.” We went back-and-forth discussing its possibilities. Two hours later I had my offer!

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FINRA

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