We sat down with Matt Watson, a Software Engineer in our Identity team who joined from Sky Bet six months ago. He tells us about his role, the biggest challenge he's worked on so far, and his interview tips.
Hi Matt, tell us about what you do and the tech stack you use.
I'm part of the team responsible for high-risk login journeys, such as changing your device or resetting your forgotten passcode. We use a Java stack in Kubernetes on AWS, Aurora (Postgres) for our database, Elasticache (Redis) for our caching layer, and Confluent Cloud Kafka for our messaging queues. I have been with the team for around five months and have already learned so much, especially about authentication tokens. The team at 10x has been super welcoming and supportive. They are a great bunch to work with.
What made you want to join 10x?
I really liked 10x's mission – to make banking better for customers and banks. Selling a sort of bank in a box that banks can apply their front end to seemed like a great idea. The more I learned about the product, like how you can build products in blocks to create unique offerings, the cooler it sounded. So I jumped on board!
What are the most exciting challenges your team faces?
We are integrating a new service that all other services in 10x will authorize against. This is a very fun challenge as we have to think about all aspects of performance and create an application that's lightning-fast with Spring/Redis/Aurora. This has been an exciting challenge, and I look forward to getting it into production soon.
Our engineering culture is always evolving, so we have many forums to share ideas and make an impact!
What's the most exciting thing about working in tech?
You are never bored! Lots of requirements come in, and, as a team, we get to tackle them thick and fast. It's quite a fast-paced environment, so every day is challenging. We use a lot of the latest tech and have the budget for the best tools, so it's great working for a fintech!
What is the best part about your job?
The people here are great. I've met lots of new people and made some good friends. We always work together as a team and support one another as much as we can. Everyone here is also incredibly intelligent, and there are many people to learn new things from. Our engineering culture is always evolving, so we have many forums to share ideas and make a large impact on what we do at 10x!
What advice would you give to people thinking about joining 10x?
We care about the person as much as the work they can do. Try to show your passion and enthusiasm for software engineering, and tell us why you love it. Skills and technology can be taught even if you don't have experience with the exact stack, so showing transferable skills such as debugging issues and clean code patterns will help with your interview.
