The start of a new year acts as an opportunity to reflect on the past year’s progress and resolve to do better.
For you, that may mean signing up for a new gym membership, aiming to read more books or finally planning that dream vacation. But for these six New York tech leaders featured below, it means dreaming up ambitious projects for the new year — and hiring fervently to make them possible.
With 2023 on the horizon, leaders from The Trade Desk, Spring Health, Multiverse and three other New York area companies are unveiling exciting and challenging initiatives for the year ahead. To accomplish their goals, they are hiring talented professionals across departments in development and engineering, data and analytics, operations and more.
Built In New York connected with these six leaders to get the scoop on their biggest upcoming projects and growth opportunities.
In anticipation of a market slowdown, leaders at the adtech company The Trade Desk are leaning into the mantra of “doing more with less” — delivering the best results possible for customers while using existing resources. Some key projects in the upcoming year include building an in-platform feature to troubleshoot clients’ advertising campaigns and improving engineers’ experience with enhanced infrastructure and development processes.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
I think one of the big trends in 2023 will be not as technology-related but more so resources-related, especially as we enter an expected market slowdown.
One of the most important things will be “doing more with less.” This does not mean working longer hours or burning people out but rather thinking about how we can become more efficient with the resources that we have and deciding how to deliver the best results with any additional resources as they become available.
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
There are two key projects that I’d like to highlight. The first involves a more traditional feature buildout for our client services teams to be able to make optimizations and troubleshooting suggestions to our clients’ advertising campaigns in-platform.
This new process will eliminate a very inefficient screenshot and email process. A key benefit of this new approach will be to start creating machine learning models to automatically generate these types of recommendations in the future, thus freeing up our teams to be more efficient, perform more advanced operations and subsequently learn from those. This will allow us to deliver high value to our clients while learning from the best resource that we have available to us: our employees.
The other project will focus on this theme of “doing more with less.” We are looking at ways to help our engineers be more efficient by improving their overall developer experience with better tooling and infrastructure and simplified development processes. This is an important area of investment because if we make our engineers even a few percent more efficient, that increase will translate to value added as if we added more engineers to the team.
We are looking at ways to help our engineers be more efficient by improving their overall developer experience.”
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
One big opportunity for growth will be developing the ability to think strategically about and constantly re-evaluate the question of what we should work on next to deliver the biggest impact. This is something that I feel is often missed when building software, as we tend to think only about the final feature set and not the possibility of delivering incremental value along the way.
To be successful at this, the engineers will have to keep in mind continuous planning and understand how to define the return on investment of taking one path over another. Defining and enumerating return on investment and making decisions based on how that affects the short- and long-term business needs are opportunities where I can see my team members growing a lot in the next year and beyond.
Bolstered by the widespread adoption of remote healthcare services, Spring Health is prioritizing making mental healthcare more accessible, cost-efficient and technologically savvy in the year ahead. On the heels of recently launching its Compass platform, the healthtech company is now exploring ways to help parents foster healthy coping strategies and behaviors in their children.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
The adoption and comfort level of receiving healthcare on digital platforms is growing across all demographics. Remote healthcare delivery, which was accelerated by the pandemic, has been made more human by the comfort of a patient’s environment.
Delivering healthcare through software-as-a-service can be used to drive integrations via API in a compliant manner, further reducing the silos between systems and making healthcare increasingly accessible globally while locally optimized. This results in tangible savings in healthcare systems through reductions in associated costs.
The core foundation of Spring Health is built on data and science. The latest cloud services and tools allow us to derive insights from vast sets of data at low latency and at a fraction of the cost.
Powerful sensors and omnipresent access to smartphones are making it possible for digital health to unlock new use cases that were not possible before. An example from the behavioral health space is that a user’s facial expressions and vocal characteristics can help detect sentiments and early signs of anxiety.
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
We recently launched Spring Health Compass, a platform designed by therapists and other care team members to drive precision and high-quality care decisions. We are getting positive reviews and great adoption across our care provider network with the launch.
Building on this, we have several initiatives on our 2023 roadmap that create a fully integrated care journey for our members, further eliminating trial-and-error cycles for clinicians and reducing time spent on back-office work.
Earlier this year, a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Network Open demonstrated that with Spring Health, patients had an average time to remission of 5.9 weeks, and nearly 70 percent of participants improved their mental health. We continue to invest in our core machine learning, AI platform and data foundation to further provide precision mental health and improve recovery.
Our members tell us that parents are increasingly looking for systems and tools to help build skills for their families to survive and thrive. We are investing in products and solutions that help children of different age groups gain access to care and content for sleep, behavior, screen time, handling grief and instilling empathy.
We continue to invest in our core machine learning, AI platform and data foundation to further provide precision mental health and improve recovery.”
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
The opportunities to innovate in digital healthcare and solve complex problems at scale create a long-lasting skill set for professionals in the technical field.
Product managers and developers on our teams have opportunities to build software using the latest tech stack while adopting experimentations, A/B testing and rapid iterations of product ideas. Our new set of solutions (such as Compass) provides learning for full-stack developers to implement micro-frontend and service-oriented architecture that can horizontally scale.
Data scientists and data engineers on the team are building skills in modeling, algorithms, analysis and recommendation engines. SecOps and DevOps teams are solving some of the complex problems for exponential scale, adopting best-in-class developer productivity tools and tuning the cloud-native stack for latency optimizations.
We have team members with years of professional experience who have built at-scale enterprise SaaS products at the biggest tech companies. We continue to invest in learning and development opportunities for our research and development team members, and we have career ladders for both individual contributors and managers.
In 2023, edtech company Multiverse is building an automated platform to enable candidates and clients to better access its learning resources and professional apprenticeship opportunities. Vice President of Engineering Sachin Goyal describes a culture that prioritizes learning, development and making an impact.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
Two of the biggest technology trends impacting Multiverse as an edtech company are automation and machine learning.
When we think about automation at Multiverse, we’re automating assessments to make it fairer for everyone. I’m excited to share that in November 2022, we scaled our situational judgment test to all of our U.K. and U.S. Multiverse career starter candidates, meaning that everyone is automatically assessed for potential, driving a fairer, faster admissions process and saving our admissions team hundreds of hours on manual interviews. As we move into 2023, we will continue to work closely with our psychometrics team to expand further on this work.
Machine learning is another trend that has a big impact on our industry. It’s essential to know how to use it diligently with care and in a fair way, but the ability to predict and make decisions based on historical data is key to automating many manual decisions. In 2023, we will explore building models for assessment on our platform.
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
We are building what we call the Multiverse platform. This platform will encapsulate all of our business processes and introduce a degree of automation and smart interventions to enable our candidates, apprentices, coaches and clients to use it seamlessly while delivering an exceptional learning journey to transform even more lives.
Building the Multiverse platform will enable us to scale powerfully and deliver an incredible experience for all of our audiences. We are building this platform using Elixir, deploying it on AWS cloud, using containerization and having automated CI/CD pipelines. As we grow as a business, we are more focussed on building a distributed system that is highly available and scalable, both for our users and our internal teams.
At Multiverse, learning and development are key parts of our culture, so you will grow incredibly fast, make an impact and have lots of fun along the way.”
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
Working at Multiverse means that your work matters. Your work has a direct impact on people’s lives, and it’s a truly empowering feeling. On a technical front, we never settle on simple. Our platform is complex and we use cutting-edge technologies.
Finally, the people who join our team are part of a special journey. They get to be surrounded by really smart people who have joined us from some of the best companies in the world. They will learn how to scale a product using the latest technologies and build the foundations of a data-led platform.
At Multiverse, learning and development are key parts of our culture, so you will grow incredibly fast, make an impact and have lots of fun along the way.
Leaders at DriveWealth, an investment and trading platform, want buying stocks to be as seamless as purchasing a cup of Joe at your local coffee shop. To achieve this, the Jersey City-based fintech company is working on transforming its infrastructure, expanding its technology and ensuring platform excellence.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
To us, the future of investing is when buying a stock is as easy as buying a cup of coffee. Whether it’s through fractional trading or other investing products like round-ups or stock rewards, the seamless experience of transforming money into investable assets will convert every customer into an investor, one transaction at a time.
We were recently granted a patent by the U.S. patent and trademark office for the Fracker. It’s an enormous milestone for a technology that has reinvented investing experience for millions of people around the world.
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
At the core of our efforts is our relentless focus on our infrastructure. We know it’s not an overnight project and have started on a three-year transformational journey that includes operational, delivery and platform excellence.
Next year, we’ll expand our technology to service additional regions around the world and the additional asset classes that retail investors are looking to invest in. Also for 2023, end-to-end reliability is at the top of our priority list to execute on delivery excellence.
Looking ahead, platform excellence, in the form of onboarding to our platform in days and multi-tenant record-keeping, is key. Our engineering teams are personally invested in reducing latency concerns while also working on automating the top 100 manual operational processes.
At the end of the day, maintaining high customer satisfaction and client support scores are at the core of our motivation. We also have some efforts that I am personally excited about. We’ll be expanding our office footprint to the West Coast with people on the ground in Silicon Valley.
DriveWealth engineers are building the future of investing.”
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
DriveWealth engineers are building the future of investing. The team has delivered solutions that DriveWealth has been recognized for through industry accolades, including the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Forbes Fintech 50, WealthTech100 and, for the second year, the CB Insights Fintech 250 and two Best Places to Work Awards. These are testaments to our successes in 2022 and DriveWealth’s runway ahead.
As we enter our next growth stage, we’re expanding our footprint to the West Coast to enable new hires to learn alongside seasoned industry experts. We’re looking for innovators who are excited about building scalable infrastructure and want to evolve how our partners use our products. Platform thinking and experience are crucial to building groundbreaking technology and fueling the retail revolution today and tomorrow.
Over the next year, EquiLend, a financial technology, data and analytics firm, is creating a distributed ledger pilot project to ensure data privacy and security. Matthew Schoenberg, director of data and analytics engineering, says that the high-profile project will likely bring increased client engagement and revenue opportunities.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
Our industry is highly regulated, and firms must vet new technologies thoroughly before introducing them into the ecosystem. The last five years have been extremely exciting. We have seen take-up of cloud-native technologies, the latest user interface frameworks and REST APIs, all of which open up new opportunities for our clients for interoperability with EquiLend applications and with each other.
Data and analytics have moved to the front of the tech stack and are helping to drive revenue. EquiLend has established a data lake for mining all data flowing through the organization. We are able to drive client engagement by analyzing usage patterns and customer preferences. Our data science team has applied machine learning techniques to help develop exciting metrics that describe the securities finance market in new and interesting ways.
Distributed ledger technology continues to find a foothold in the securities finance space. To that end, EquiLend launched a distributed ledger initiative that will revolutionize how counterparties manage securities finance transactions. We feel that the data privacy and security provided by a properly architectured shared ledger solves several pain points.
EquiLend launched a distributed ledger initiative that will revolutionize how counterparties manage securities finance transactions.”
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
One of the biggest projects we’re working on is the distributed ledger pilot that I mentioned before.
A securities finance contract is a living document. Attributes of the contract, like price and rate benchmarks, change daily. Counterparties must constantly reconcile their versions of the contracts to manage exposure and risk properly. EquiLend and our clients agree it would be more efficient to work from a single copy of the contract.
This is where a distributed ledger technology solution fits. Advances in distributed ledger technology now incorporate security and trust into the architecture as a first-order principle. This allows users of the distributed ledger to share ownership and trust of data across a network and removes the requirement for a centralized data store. Distributed ledger technology nodes use cryptography to create an audit trail, and users can validate against the ledger independently.
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
The distributed ledger technology and UX projects both have visibility to the top of our organization. These high-profile projects come with expectations of increased client engagement and new revenue.
EquiLend has always been a technology-forward company. Our technologists are integral to the entire software development life cycle. Team members have the opportunity to work with our senior sales and client relationship managers, internal IT teams, quality assurance, DevOps, etc.
EquiLend is also a global company. These initiatives may open up opportunities to interact with team members from outside New York. We have teams based in the U.K., Europe and Asia.
In addition, EquiLend has had great success with our rotational analyst program. Each year, we look to recruit smart, driven, motivated technology talent to join EquiLend. Our rotational analysts have experience working for multiple teams like engineering, data science, quality assurance, DevOps, infrastructure, database administration and client services. After one year, if it seems like the right fit for everyone, we offer analysts a permanent position.
Current is aiming to innovate traditional banking products by unifying credit with spending, savings and crypto onto a single platform. With a small team of fewer than 200 people, the fintech company offers a lot of opportunities to make a significant impact and grow your skill sets, Chief Technology Officer Trevor Marshall said.
How do you plan to react to technology trends currently impacting your industry in 2023?
The pullback in the public markets has been a dominating force in business model strategy for technology companies in 2022. There is a renewed focus on margins across all industries, and technology companies are uniquely positioned to control their means of production by bringing functionality in-house.
Current has been fortunate to have this focus for many years, which is why we invested heavily into our core banking technology as a primary differentiator to traditional banks and other financial technology companies. We are in an enviable position because we have been able to cut out huge swaths of middlemen and pass that value back to members in the form of removing subscription fees and adding high-yield savings, while still improving our contribution margins.
We will continue to lean into this advantage in 2023 and ensure that we deliver best-in-class products on the back of best-in-class margins.
What is the biggest project your teams are working on in the next year?
Innovation at banks means finding new ways to distribute old products; checking, savings, investments and credit accounts haven’t fundamentally changed in decades.
At Current, with the platform we’ve built over the last eight years, we get to control the fundamental building blocks of financial products. We’ve already been able to combine spending, savings and crypto buy/sell into a single unified experience. In 2023, we will focus on adding in credit, which will give members more flexibility in navigating their spending and budgeting needs.
Additionally, we will continue investing in all of the building blocks we’ve created so far and refining our product so that retention and organic referrals can be the primary drivers of our business’s success.
For those who join our team, growth comes in the form of immediate operational leverage.”
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members working on this project?
We’ve done a lot with a small and focused team. When I interview candidates, they are often surprised to hear about the breadth of the platform and the fact that we have been able to deliver it with fewer than 200 people across the entire organization.
For those who join our team, growth comes in the form of immediate operational leverage. If you’re an engineer, you will be deploying code to millions of people within your first week. If you’re a product manager, you will be expected to help craft a roadmap and shape the initiatives that will move us closer to our mission of improving the financial outcomes for our members.
With such a tight operation, your contribution is immediate and obvious. This experience has quickly accelerated the experience and skill sets of those who are up for the challenge.
