George discusses the 'engineering DNA' at Goji and how a culture of curiosity empowers our Cloud Operations team to solve complex architectural challenges.
What first drew you to Goji, and how has the reality of the role lived up to expectations?
I’ve always been drawn to roles that offer a genuine chance to learn and grow. When I first heard about the disruption Goji was making in private markets, I was intrigued by the technical challenges that would naturally accompany that kind of innovation. What really stood out to me, however, was the culture of openness and curiosity.
Nearly two years later, that culture remains a defining part of my experience. Within the Cloud Ops team, this environment empowers us to dedicate time to developing our skills and staying ahead of the curve. Whether we’re designing our next major architectural shift or building bespoke internal tooling, there is always a fresh problem to solve that keeps the work engaging.
How does your role as a Senior Cloud Engineer directly impact Goji’s mission to digitise private markets?
Cloud Operations is such an interesting meeting point in the Venn diagram of Goji's needs. We help to ensure the availability and scalability of the platform infrastructure, support our developers to safely and rapidly deploy changes, and enable teams to be more aware of their security posture.
Being a Senior Cloud Engineer means I get to keep my fingers in every pie. I get to imagine the future of our platform, design and build tools to help the engineering teams, and work with the other members of our team, whether that's exploring new learning goals together or supporting each other through difficult tasks.
How would you describe the ‘engineering DNA’ at Goji? What kind of person thrives here?
The core values of Goji are baked into everything we do. From my experience, a person who is consistently curious and willing to deep dive into topics that they are interested in will find a certain joy in their time here.
There is a consistent focus on pragmatism; while we are all in on an accepted solution, we are still encouraged to explore "two-way doors". This gives us a lot of freedom to move fast and innovate without having to fear choosing the "wrong" solution.
If you are the sort of person who takes a high level of ownership, values being trusted to make and explain the right decisions, and has the discipline to see your decisions through to delivery, you'll find Goji a great place to work.
Fintech requires a unique balance of high-speed innovation and rigorous security. How do you and the Cloud Ops team navigate those ‘high stakes’ while maintaining agility?
Goji runs regular penetration tests from external providers and is consistent in upholding the ISO 27001 standard. These act as a really useful baseline to define what must be in place. It helps inform the guardrails we put in place, from strong storage policies to a principle of least privilege in IAM.
We are able to support teams by providing "golden paths". These are tested and well-known methods to deploy code and infrastructure with security baked in by default. Teams have previously commented that they value not needing to think about the best way to deploy a database; we are able to reduce cognitive load while ensuring that there are no inherent security risks. Another example of how we support teams through risk is by automating our global database clusters. This means that every team is able to benefit from security and performance updates as quickly as possible without risking extended downtime.
Because Cloud Ops has such a broad view across our platform, we are empowered to help teams in whatever manner is best, for example, right now we're further enhancing our tooling for awareness of vulnerabilities in our supply chain. We focus on automation to provide a safety net so everyone can be comfortable knowing that the work they produce is safe, regardless of the pace of innovation.
What is your favourite memory from your time at Goji?
That's really hard to nail down.There are a lot of great memories. But if I'm forced to choose, it has to be my first summer social. I'd barely been here for a few weeks but apparently it was long enough to have my name on the office bingo cards (my sass knows no bounds).
To top it all off, before we left the office I ended up head-to-head in a rock-paper-scissors game with Goji's CFO, Alex (a very graceful loser), before being destroyed, robbing me of my podium finish!
What was your dream job as a child, and is there any crossover between that and what you do now?
For a long time, I dreamed that I would have my own bookshop-come-cafe-come-library, which hasn't really disappeared, so maybe one day I'll manage it!
It's hard to know exactly what went wrong (or right) that led me down the computer nerd route instead. While they both feel miles apart, they also both share a very similar end goal: curating an incredible experience. This is something we're always aiming for in Cloud Ops. We want to make it so easy to build the best systems that building them feels like a day out rather than anything more laborious
What would you do if you had unlimited free time?
In November, we welcomed our first child into the world, so I think it's impossible for me to say anything other than spending every waking moment with her! I've slowly been getting my wife comfortable with me baby-wearing for a few hours so I'm hoping soon we can start going for hikes.
But if she's sleeping? There are so many things I would do, I don't know how I'd fit them all in! I've been gradually learning Arabic as I study the Qur'an and every facet of that is so interesting. Did you know that each letter in a word has a meaning, and words that share the same letters will share a common meaning?
If she's somehow still managing to get some good rest, I'd split the leftover time between playing with my favourite programming language (Rust, obviously) and making that bookshop a reality.
Any exciting projects on the horizon? What are you and your team up to next?
We're always planning and investigating what to look at next. I'm excited to continue evolving our internal developer platform, making it even easier for engineers to stay up to date with any changes and contribute to our infrastructure. While teams love having the golden paths available to them, I know it always feels good to contribute fixes.
Otherwise, I'm particularly excited about some work we're planning for later in the year to expand our internal platform to help ensure all infrastructure continues to meet our rigorous standards. The goal is to make it so simple that anyone can build a new rule and start reporting on it. It's a project I've wanted to build in a few different roles, and I'm glad the team has agreed to let me run wild with it here!