An Engineer’s Unique Approach to Optimizing Systems

With large-scale tech projects involving office servers, infrastructure servers, AWS and other cloud-based products, Michelle enabled DRW to be efficient and smart in how we migrate our systems, which includes getting buy-in from our senior leaders on making the change. She’s a trusted mentor to engineers not only on her team but beyond and has built trust throughout the organization by openly sharing ideas and best practices to help the operations of other groups run more efficiently.

As a systems engineer on DRW’s infrastructure team, Michelle operates in a challenging, fast-moving, high-intensity role. She’s been at DRW for over a decade and is always seeking to optimize our systems, challenge consensus, and is known for her ability to see “around the corner” in order to anticipate future issues. While she is passionate about cutting-edge technology, she is also disciplined about finding the most efficient solution to the problem, even if it isn't shiny and new. She approaches projects at a high-level and can think through the interplay of the different components to build consensus around the best path forward.

The experience that Michelle has gained from the various roles she’s had at DRW over the last 12 years contributes to her success daily, and helps her better understand the business needs, risk, and urgency for every project. This knowledge has been especially invaluable on larger-scale projects. Most recently, she was tasked with migrating over a hundred servers to a newer operating system. The institutional knowledge she gained over the years allowed her to work closely with development groups to assist them in migrating their applications, often going beyond the call of duty. This helped ensure a smooth transition to the new servers, but also resulted in little or no noticeable downtime for our end users who rely on these critical systems.

Michelle is never complacent. She thrives in the trading industry given that the only constant is change—and she goes above and beyond to stay on top of the new technology, new designs, and new ways to solve problems. She is the first to admit she never knows it all, but she puts forth significant effort to self-study, making time on her commute or in her down time to read/research so she can understand the new topic to implement in her work.