Claudio

Tell us about the role of a Graduate Software Developer:

I work with the APAC valuations team, which has grown from 2-4 employees to 8-10 in the last year. It’s got a great mix of experience combined with other junior developers, creating a great atmosphere to learn and grow. Technically I’m on the C++ team, but I tend to write more python or anything else really. The best answer to what I do is solve problems with anything, be it writing a new feature to interface with our backtester, make some pipeline to get data from a new source, or fixing something related to our build systems. With the variety of work there is to do, no 2 days are the same.

Tell us about you:

I grew up on the Central Coast, near Woy Woy / Gosford. I went to Gosford high school, then to USYD. I’m from Switzerland originally, and I’ve gone back 2-3 times, but haven’t really travelled much outside of that. I’ve worked various part time jobs since I was 14, touching everything from pizza delivery to stacking shelves to it support. I didn’t intern anywhere before Akuna but spent over a year here over summer and my last year of uni. I found Akuna through the website, and simply applied and went through the steps. The process was super quick, somewhere around 2 weeks from start to offer.

Tell us about Akuna:

I picked Akuna because I didn’t want to work at a larger tech company where you’d wouldn’t get much responsibility quickly, and you’re mostly solving already solved issues, simply maintaining existing systems. This mostly eventuated itself, Akuna still has a lot of scaling up and out to do, giving you plenty of opportunities to grow yourself. A bit of an odd example but managed to take down one of our trading desks within our first few weeks. Although not exactly a high point, it showed that there is no babysitting from management, or as someone put it “alot of rope to hang yourself with”.

Who would do well at Akuna:

Anybody that’s a reasonably decent developer and is willing to learn things on the fly would be able to do my job. The most important skill / characteristic one could have for my job is simply a willingness to constantly learn new things, technologies and otherwise, as we’re always looking to take advantage of any new developments, inside and outside of the company.

Advice for students:

1. Try everything once, you never know if you like something until you do.
2. A cliché – but don’t be in a rush, you have more time than you think.
3. Always be willing to learn something new, at work or otherwise, you never know when it’ll come in handy.