I’m a software engineer in Sydney, working in a trading firm. Day to day that means systems where being correct and being fast are the same requirement — trading risk systems and market controls for high-frequency trading, reconciling trade flow against independent exchange feeds, low-latency pricing, and the platform and observability layers that keep it all running and diagnosable in production.
I joined my current firm in 2021, spent a year at AWS building control plane and data plane services for customer monitoring at scale, then came back. Before Sydney I was in Johannesburg for six years at Absa, leading a team on a cloud-native observability platform and a distributed risk calculation engine. Earlier roles were in trading and enterprise software at Barclays Capital, Gazprom Marketing & Trading, and Advent Software.
The thread through most of it is the same. A solid grasp of the fundamentals — how the runtime schedules your work, what a data structure actually costs, where a distributed system quietly loses correctness — is what lets you pick up new tools without building something you’ll regret later. That’s most of what I write about here: reading concurrency primitives from the source, measuring performance instead of assuming it, and the anomalies an isolation level still lets through.
I’ve contributed to ASP.NET Core and gRPC for .NET. Most of my code is on GitHub, and you can reach me at vaughanreid@gmail.com.