Career & craft

Three concurrent roles in the Discretionary Mandates crew (~60–80 people). Crew architect ongoing since August 2024; chapter lead and initiative lead added April 2026. Both new roles map onto work I then took hands-on through 2026 — the chapter mandate runs through an AI-driven reshaping of analysis and testing work, and the platform renovation parallels the legacy-to-modern, cost-disciplined, multi-tenant migration I went on to work end to end on my own stack.

Crew Architect — Discretionary Mandates

• Crew-level domain architect across eight applications: cross-system boundaries, data flows, application-interaction patterns, shared-component decisions.
• Operating mode: review, advise, escalate; partner to the stream-level architect on target-state designs.
• IT-side single point of contact for the Credit Suisse client-book migration, concluded across HK, SG, CH, AU in April 2026 (see the 2024 entry for the full migration story).

Chapter Lead — Business Analysis and Quality Assurance (since 2026-04)

• Discipline owner for BA and QA across the crew. 16 reports: 10 internal + 6 contractors, spanning 8 business analysts, manual and automation quality engineering, and a technology-risk specialist.
• Standard line-management hygiene: alignment, compliance, performance management.
• AI-driven role-evolution programme across both disciplines: GitHub Copilot rollout, follow-through on hands-on usage, contribution to an org-level working group on QA role evolution under automation, parallel exercise for the BA function.

Initiative Lead — Platform Renovation Programme (since 2026-04)

• Accountable for delivery of a multi-year renovation of three applications in the crew (portfolio management, order management, fund-account) plus the underlying infrastructure platform.
• Team: 10–15 engineers, two product owners, a stream-level domain architect on initiative scope.
• Stack moves from Eclipse RCP rich-client + Java/Spring + Oracle + on-prem to React web + Spring Boot + Postgres + cloud.
• First production cutover targeted Q1 2027; end-state Q1 2029 still counts as success.
• Operating discipline: transparent architecture-decision-record repository, regular stakeholder cadence, lead-crew posture toward sibling crews considering the same path.
• Personal goal: establish a working model for agentic-AI participation across architecture, testing, and build work — not a side-experiment, the default operating mode where it earns its place.

Crew-level domain architect and IT risk lead for the Discretionary Mandates crew. Architect responsibilities continue today and extend forward into the April-2026 chapter-lead and initiative-lead overlays captured in the current-roles entry above.

Credit Suisse client-book migration — IT-side single point of contact for the Discretionary Mandates crew

• Mandate: bridge between the central integration programme and the crew’s applications + people; own delivery on the crew side; lead architecture across applications inside the crew; flag risk early; report both to programme leadership and into the crew.
• Shape: multi-year delivery across four markets, run in multiple waves with subwaves between 2024 and April 2026.
• Asia (2024). First strategic-platform rollout for the Asian booking centres, delivered in Hong Kong and Singapore waves. Revamped the portfolio management system from a Swiss-only legacy footprint into a multi-entity-capable strategic application, with new client-data-confidentiality controls and new system interfaces. Operational reconciliation processes designed and run to guarantee portfolio-migration correctness.
• Switzerland (H2 2025 – March 2026). Multiple subwaves on the Swiss platform covered Wealth Management Switzerland clients (discretionary-mandate and fund-account segments), then Wealth Management International clients booked on the same platform — the largest client volumes of the programme.
• Australia (April 2026). The heaviest technical lift: rolled out the portfolio management system into the Australian context with integration into the Australian core banking system that had moved into UBS’s portfolio through the same integration. New interfaces for portfolio positions, client static data, and client-order placement to market.
• Outcome across all four markets: tens of thousands of mandates migrated, no outages, no P&L-impacting technical failures. End of the multi-year programme for the Discretionary Mandates lane: April 2026.

Stepped in as Product Owner for the strategic portfolio management system (January 2025 → February 2026)

• Delivering at Australia scale demanded senior delivery leadership and a team rebuild beyond what the product-owner seat then carried. Took the seat directly, reorganized and built up the team, and carried delivery against the Australia demand — sole owner for roughly a year, plus a two-month parallel handover to the eventual successor.
• Concurrent with crew architect, IT risk manager, single point of contact for CS migration, and line management of one direct report.
• Brought in a senior engineer as external contractor in April 2025; internalised across the year and is now the team’s Product Owner.
• Beyond the Australia rollout, the team delivered investor-protection regulatory work, technical-debt remediation, security and vulnerability fixes, and audit and compliance items across the same window.

Domain architect at crew level

• Cross-system boundaries, data flows, application-interaction patterns, shared-component decisions across the applications in the crew.
• Partner to the stream-level architect on target-state designs; review, advise, escalate. Application-internal architecture sits with the lead engineers on each application.
• On the Australia wave specifically, the target-state blueprint came from the stream level; the crew-side contribution was heavy review, early-issue surfacing, and alignment through working sessions before formal decision bodies.

IT risk manager for the crew

• Took over an area where the crew had been continuously missing deadlines on technology-risk remediation. Set up processes, governance, and checkpoints across the crew to bring the work back onto a defensible footing.
• Explicit goal: the seat should not require architect-level involvement in target-state — and it now meets it. Target-state risk work runs end-to-end through the technology-risk specialist on the team, with the architect role accountable but no longer operationally embedded.

Chapter Lead for the platform and data warehouse engineering discipline — the chapter holding the engineers building the foundational platform that all ~18 investment-management applications run on, plus the engineers of the internal data warehouse.

Chapter Lead — discipline ownership

• 13 reports: 6 internals + 7 contractors, mix held stable across the tenure.
• Standard year-on-year management hygiene: alignment, performance management, contract renewals, hiring posture.

Product Owner — three applications

• A small system the team owned end-to-end, successfully decommissioned during the tenure.
• The mass-mandates portfolio management system — over 100,000 mandates in Switzerland as its largest location, the platform’s most heavily-used portfolio system. An engineer on this application since it started; as Product Owner, now drawing on that technical knowledge from the other side.
• The customisable-mandates portfolio management system — far smaller mandate count (~5,000 mandates), each carrying significantly higher assets under management.

Strategic merger of two Investment Management project teams in March 2021 — took on the combined Portfolio Implementation team alongside the Director promotion in the same month.

• Promoted to Director rank, March 2021.
• Line management for 19 people: 13 internals + 6 contractors (including the prior team of 11).
• Product ownership across four applications in the combined team’s scope.
• Lead architect on cross-application design and platform-level decisions.
• Merger integration — consolidated two adjacent codebases and two sets of operating routines into a single team. The year ran as much on establishing a single operating model for the merged team as on feature delivery.

Returned from the Singapore assignment in February 2020 into a line-management role at scale on the Portfolio Implementation platform.

• Line management for 11 reports: 7 internals + 3 contractors + 1 apprentice.
• Product ownership for three applications in the team’s scope.
• Lead architect on the platform — cross-application design and platform-level decisions.

Six-month international assignment to establish the second strategic IT location for Investment Management alongside Zürich. APAC-time-zone engineering ownership of the investment management systems.

• Built the founding software-engineering team from a near-zero base (one pre-existing engineer): hired two internal senior software engineers and one contractor.
• Hiring posture: technological aptitude as the floor, attitude and ownership orientation on top — people who want responsibility from design through to production operation.
• Led the ramp-up project end-to-end as lead business analyst, architect, and delivery owner. Chose a project at the centre of my own expertise so knowledge could transfer through working sessions and direct collaboration, not through brittle documentation.
• Layered knowledge-transfer: structured sessions with Zürich, shared technical documentation, regular Q&A and pairing time, visits from Zürich leadership during the assignment.
• Operating mode shifted by design — first three-to-four months heavily hands-on; final two months deliberately hands-off so the team would function without me before I left.
• Project shipped at quality within weeks of handover; team moved on to a new application after the initial ramp.
• Team remains operational six-plus years later, under entirely refreshed personnel.

Lead engineer on the Portfolio Implementation platform.

• Architecture and design lead for the portfolio management system.
• Requirements engineering across business stakeholders.
• Broker between business, engineering, and architecture forums.

Two-and-a-half-year tour as Senior Software Engineer on the Portfolio Implementation platform, layering in Scrum Master responsibilities for the Zürich development team across the full window.

Senior Software Engineer

• Java enterprise stack on the portfolio-implementation system.
• CI/CD subject-matter expertise — shell scripting and Jenkins as the build-and-deployment backbone for the platform during this window.
• Third-level production-incident coordination as primary contact for the Zürich team’s production issues.
• Member of the architecture board; code-review and non-functional-test contributor across the platform.
• Promoted to Associate Director rank, March 2018.

Scrum Master — Zürich development team (twelve engineers)

• Facilitator of the team’s agile cadence across the full two-and-a-half-year window.
• Liaison with contracted offshore development teams on shared deliveries — bridging toolchain conventions and code-review practice.
• UBS internal-developer-community contributor: workshops, conferences, and hackathons inside the bank.

First tour as a full Software Engineer on the Portfolio Implementation platform.

• Java enterprise stack: Java 7, Spring, Oracle, Hibernate/JPA, Maven, Git, Bash, Tomcat, Jenkins.
• Near-three-year tour on the platform that continues forward through the scrum-master, lead-engineer, team-lead, chapter-lead, and crew-architect seats above.