Harry Margiolakiotis

Jag Sheemar

QA Lead

I joined Thought Machine in 2017 looking for a new challenge in an industry that was yet to be disrupted and at a company where I would be able to work on multiple projects as I love multitasking. Having worked with Thought Machine’s CTO Will Montgomery for 4 years at Google on the Adsense project, I was immediately confident in the future of the company. I jumped at the opportunity to bring my skills to Thought Machine to create a QA process and test strategy for both product side and client side, as well as write and maintain BDD automation tests to ensure our releases were quicker and more efficient.

One of the most important differentiators for me is that Thought Machine is the only company where I worked where QA and developers work together and exchange knowledge with one and another, which is great if you want to progress at Thought Machine, everyone is open to sharing, learning and debating new ideas and tools to continue improving the product.

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Jag Sheemar

QA Lead

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Will Drazin

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Backend Engineer

After finishing my PhD I chose to pursue a career outside of academia, but I didn’t want to lose the technical rigour that I so enjoyed during the past few years of research. Having written scientific software, I come from a background where the quality of engineering is instrumental in producing meaningful research.

One of the main reasons that I chose to work at Thought Machine was its reputation for engineering excellence. We are an engineering driven company, and we take great pride in the quality of our work. As a Technical Analyst I have the opportunity to interact with clients on a daily basis, working with them to understand their business needs and collaborate with our engineers to conduct solution design work. As a technical generalist, the thing I most enjoy about the role is the amount of variety: one moment I’ll be presenting a technical overview of Vault to a new member of our client team, the next I’ll be pouring over the codebase with an engineer as we work to whiteboard a technical solution to a client requirement.

Outside of work I’m usually busy pursuing one of numerous (probably too numerous) hobbies. We’ve recently started a Thought Machine Cycling Club and have been on several successful outings, including to Brighton and Cambridge, with further trips planned in the future. When I’m not on the saddle I’m usually found at the piano or cooking some delicious pasta!

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Will Drazin

Backend Engineer

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Paulo Ribeiro

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Site Reliability Engineer

Initially, the level of professionalism put into the website for such a small company (at the time) gave me the impression that Thought Machine held things to a high-standard. It was clear the company held their engineers in high regard; after attending the hiring event, and meeting a few of them, I was convinced.

My favourite aspect of Thought Machine is the fact that a group of people with diverse backgrounds and disciplines can band together, and collaborate under a common desire; to engineer our product to be the best in scalability and reliability.

Things move fast at Thought Machine, at the speed we are growing it can be hard to stay on top of everything. To manage this, the Cloud team is striving to add more documentation and automation to our processes. It can be tough to balance resolving toil with creating the tools to reduce it, but it's a worthwhile investment to ensure the company can scale.

Working with the cloud gives me a lot of exposure to the different development streams at Thought Machine. Because of this, I get the opportunity to work with other engineers on several parts of the product. In addition, having a mix of software and systems tasks means there's never a dull day at the office.

Outside of work I like to contribute to open-source projects, mostly around tools I use at work, or in my (very) amateur home lab, and automating as much of my life as humanly-possible. I'm also quite fond of video games -- Adventure/Logic are my favourite, as well as the occasional competitive game -- and also cinema/animation.

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Paulo Ribeiro

Site Reliability Engineer

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Jamica Ortiz

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Engineering Manager

A little while back, I was looking for a fresh start in an industry I’ve never worked in before. Thought Machine had this really interesting hiring process where you get to meet people from the team before committing to the hiring process – and for me that was a great way to get to know a company’s culture beforehand. I got to ask many questions about how they work and what things they are working on, and from there I felt like I shared many values with Thought Machine’s working culture.

I love how we cultivate a safe space to express our ideas and set each other up for success. My team also works with really challenging areas of software development, specifically on application infrastructure and reliability, which are key components for smoothly running a core banking system in the cloud.

It is great being able to work with multiple programming languages and working with both the application and infrastructure layers. There are many people with different specialisations to learn from. I especially find it exciting to work with new technology for cloud applications and learn how to work with them in production.

Outside of work I strangely find Botanical Painting and Calligraphy to be very similar activities to coding in the sense that they both require focus to create nice things, so I am really into those outside of technology.

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Jamica Ortiz

Engineering Manager

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Zoé Fabian

Zoé is a Managing Director at Eurazeo Growth and is based in Berlin. Before joining Eurazeo Growth, Zoé invested globally in technology-driven companies at pre-IPO stage. Prior to that, Zoé was a Senior Investment Manager at Axel Springer, Europe's largest digital publishing house, where she led several growth investments in a joint venture with General Atlantic, focusing on marketplaces, as well as in adtech and traveltech, including Yad2 and @Leisure. Zoé started her career at Blackstone, first out of Paris and then based in New York City, advising on M&A, restructuring and IPOs with a focus on Energy and Consumer.

She is currently serving on the boards of Adjust and Sophia Genetics.

Zoé graduated with a MSc in International Management from ESCP Europe and a degree in Economics from Freie Universität Berlin.

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Zoé Fabian

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Max Bautin

Max co-founded IQ Capital in 2007 and looks after investments in fintech, insurtech, comms and medtech space as well as leading fundraising activities.

Max has been in venture capital since 2001 and has led investments into over three dozen start-ups, with exits including Grapeshot (Oracle), Phonetic Arts (Google), Neul (Huawei), Spectral Edge (Apple), Stillfront (IPO), Sirigen (BD) and Quotient (EKF). He currently represents IQ Capital on the boards of several scale-ups – including Audio Analytic, Concirrus, Fluidic Analytics and Thought Machine, collectively valued at well over $1bn and growing rapidly. Max also works with a number of seed stage companies as board advisor.

Prior to venture, Max spent a few years in telecoms, where he caught the start-up bug while being part of operating teams building mobile operators from start to scale up.

Max has been a member of Invest Europe (formerly EVCA) Venture Capital Council since 2015 and was elected to the Board in 2019. Max holds a BSc in Economics (Maryland) and an MBA (Cambridge).

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Max Bautin

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Andy Maguire

Chair

Andy Maguire is a recognised banking industry expert with a track record of developing and implementing sustainable transformation and growth strategies. Maguire holds a thirty-year track record as a successful COO, partner to CEOs and Executive Committees, who is equally comfortable in high performing businesses, growth or turnaround situations.

Prior to joining Thought Machine, Maguire was the Group Chief Operations Officer of HSBC (2014 - 2020) having previously been a Partner and Senior Partner at the Boston Consulting Group for 17 years.

As Group Chief Operations Officer of HSBC, Maguire was responsible for the overall operation of the bank’s Wealth and Private Banking, Commercial Banking, and Global Banking and Markets divisions in the UK, Europe, US, Canada, Latin America, Middle East and Asia. He was responsible for the bank’s operational excellence, and led its technology transformation efforts including migration projects to the cloud.

Leading the bank’s efforts on cost management, digitisation and operational resilience, Maguire transitioned the bank away from yesterday's technology, paving the way for forward-thinking HSBC projects including Mobile X, HSBCnet, Payme and Kinetic. These initiatives, among others, have transformed the bank’s cybersecurity, IT service levels and operational process performance.

Prior to his roles at HSBC and BCG, Maguire was a Principal at Gemini Consulting and AT Kearney. Maguire holds a Double Honours degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.

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Andy Maguire

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Richard Little

Richard Little is an angel investor and entrepreneurial non-executive director in software and services businesses. Richard is a board member of Thought Machine, previously holding the role of Chair. Richard holds Chairman positions in CenturyTech and ChargePoint. He is also an investor in a number of start-ups including Form3 and Azur. Richard has achieved significant exits in his career including Dovetail Group to Fiserv in 2017 and GreenHat to IBM in 2011.

Richard’s career began in 1979 with Burrough Machines Ltd, selling accounting systems to small businesses in West London. In 1982 he set up his own business Braid, leading the company to exit with a sale to Mercator for $125m.

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Richard Little

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Meet some more of my leadership colleagues...

Meet some more of my colleagues...

Meet some more of my board colleagues...