I am a Software Engineer in the Lending In Life team at Engine. In this role, I develop and deliver a variety of features to enable Engine’s clients to effectively manage and service their customer’s loans and mortgages.
When I finished high school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next, but I did quite well in Maths and Physics, so Engineering seemed like a natural fit for me. The first year of my university degree offered papers across various engineering disciplines, which allowed me to sample each field. I found I enjoyed Software Engineering the most and it aligned with my general interest in technology, so I specialised in it for the remainder of my degree.
After graduating, I worked as a Software Engineer in my home country, New Zealand, for four years before making the move to London and landing a role with Engine last year.
One of the first things I implemented at Engine was a testing framework to simulate and test the entire lifecycle of a loan. It takes a CSV file containing a series of events such as repayments, forbearance, or changes to the loan terms.
Then, it iterates through each day of the loan, applying the events at the given date and time, and validates that the loan schedule and balances have been correctly updated. I am proud of this piece of work because it uncovered several bugs that we were able to fix before loans
went live with our first client, Salt. Additionally, it significantly strengthened my understanding of the loan service as a whole.
This isn’t the most profound advice I’ve ever received, but it’s something that has always stuck with me. Early in my career, a mentor told me a story about a colleague who sent out a company-wide email, only for someone else to accidentally click “reply all” with a message that contained gossip about other people in the office. The person then tried to cover up this mistake, causing the situation to escalate
further.
The advice my mentor gave me off the back of this story was always to take ownership and accountability of everything you do in your career, even the silly mistakes. If you take responsibility for your actions, people will trust you to do a good job and they are generally a lot more forgiving and understanding if you do make a mistake.
The other piece of advice I took from that story was to always double-check who you are replying to when working with large group emails!
Outside of work, I enjoy cooking, baking, travelling, spending time with friends, and exploring all that London has to offer – it’s all still quite new and exciting for this small-town NZ girl!
“Outstanding contribution to major feature sets, including fees, collateral, and product switching, filling out or mortgage offer in such a significant way that the CEO of a major bank recently commented “wow this is real and not just vapourware” and otherwise being taken seriously as a major player in the mortgage SaaS space.
“In their short time since joining, they stunned the wider engineering team with their innovative approach to testing myriad hyper-complicated “toxic combinations” of lending scenarios.”
