Randy McFarland | Director of Partnerships

Alice Cao

Backend Engineer

After graduating from university with a degree in Physics, I knew that I wanted my first job to be difficult, intellectually stimulating and fun. I first found out about Thought Machine when one of our in-house recruiters reached out to me via LinkedIn and invited me to a hiring event to meet the Engineers and CEO. Having been through a number of recruitment processes, I was impressed by the attitude to hiring at Thought Machine and came away from the event with the impression that this was an exciting company in an exciting industry, which really cared about its culture and employees.

I am one of five Back End Engineers working in the Kernel Users & Accounts team. The majority of code that we write and the features that we add are directly used by clients. I enjoy how closely we work together and being able to learn from Engineers who have much more experience than I do. I also like the fact that we can have fun while doing our job and have even started to build our own team traditions and long-running jokes.

The tech stack at Thought Machine is cutting edge. Coupled with the fact that we are going through a phase of rapid expansion, this makes the work environment very fast paced. In the five months that I have been here so far, the team has doubled in size and the tools I use on a daily basis for development are continuously evolving. There are many socials and events that go on outside of work, and you are given many opportunities to make your own mark on the company. In my time here so far, I have been able to start a sports club, given a talk at a tech conference and visited my alma mata, Imperial College, as part of the sponsors’ delegation for ICHack, the university's biggest annual hackathon.

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Alice Cao

Backend Engineer

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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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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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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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Andy Phillipps

Andy is an experienced entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Active Hotels which he sold to Priceline.com and became CEO of their non-US business. He then co-led the acquisition of Bookings BV and subsequent merger with Active Hotels to form what is now Booking.com (market cap over $50bn). He was Chairman of Toptable (now part of Priceline) and co-founder of Reevoo. He is an active business angel, regularly teaches at LBS and INSEAD and is a board director or adviser to a number of tech ventures.

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Andy Phillipps

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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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Peter Hayes

Peter Hayes is a career Banker who retired from Lloyds Banking Group in 2018 having joined in 2010 from RBS. During the last 27 years in banking he was focused entirely on the major change programmes undertaken in both banks. As Director Group Change Management at Lloyds, he was responsible for the Group’s full change portfolio.

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Peter Hayes

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Hans Morris

Hans Morris is managing partner of Nyca Partners, a fintech VC in New York and San Francisco founded in 2014, and currently investing in its third fund. He is the chairman of the board of Lending Club, and a board member of six private companies: AvidXchange, Payoneer, SigFig, PayRange, Fidel, and Propel. From 2010 to 2014 he was managing director at General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm. From 2007 until 2010 he served as president of Visa Inc., and from 1980 until 2007, he worked at Citigroup in several operating and management roles, including CFO and head of finance, technology, and operations for Citi’s institutional businesses, COO of the investment bank, and head of the financial services group at Salomon Smith Barney. He is a trustee of the Public Theater in New York and a former chairman of the boards of MASS MoCA and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. He graduated from Dartmouth College.

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Hans Morris

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Randy McFarlane

Meet some more of my leadership colleagues...

Meet some more of my colleagues...

Meet some more of my board colleagues...