Venessa Doss

Paulo Ribeiro

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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Alice Cao

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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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Jag Sheemar

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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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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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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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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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Meet some more of my leadership colleagues...

Meet some more of my colleagues...

Meet some more of my board colleagues...