Our people are central to our success. Having the brightest minds developing highly sophisticated trading and risk management technology sets our business apart and allows us to serve some of the most advanced investors in the world. Financial services technology is at the leading edge, presenting exciting career opportunities for smart and inquisitive students, but how can bright, young talent kick-off a career in such a specialized industry? To capture and inspire exceptional talent, TS Imagine proudly runs a hands-on intern program, showcasing the breadth and excitement of the industry to ambitious graduates.
Gabriel Gibb | Associate, Professional Services, EMEA
Our most recent interns, Nicholas and Timur, both joined us from Imperial College London where they are going into the third year of their Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degrees, respectively. They spent 11 weeks working with TS Imagine’s Professional Services team in London this summer under the supervision of myself and Simarjit Johal (Regional Team Lead).
From the outset, it was clear that Nick and Timur were eager to embark on a joint project, and I was keen to see what they could accomplish together. They took on the development of a dashboard to visualise data from our stress testing engine, which is written in our JavaScript API, enabling highly flexible interactions with our core risk management system.
The team was able to apply their impressive development skills, from writing a data pipeline and an aggregation layer in JavaScript, to visualizing the impact of various scenarios on a series of Greeks for a dummy investment portfolio. The program gave Nick and Timur an opportunity to apply what they have been studying to real life scenarios and present their hard work to the most senior figures in the business.
Here, they present an account of their time with the company.
Nicholas Kwok
Starting the internship, I had very little knowledge of finance, but TS Imagine appealed to me as a fast-growing business where I could apply my skills and work on exciting projects. While I had done some programming, I had never done anything beyond writing single-use scripts for processing data in class, let alone working on a global software development team with libraries containing thousands of lines of code.
When I joined, I immediately felt welcomed by the team. We were tasked with building a dashboard to visualize stress test results under the close guidance of the team. The scope of the project had major implications, as it was the first dashboard using the new risk engine for our buy-side clients.
In our first week, Timur and I jumped into a crash course on JavaScript, APIs and the risk products. There is a diverse breadth of technologies in the risk offering, so getting my head around all the microservices was a challenge. Yet, by the end of the sixth week, we had finished building a working first draft of the project. We built the data pipeline process in JavaScript from scratch, used parallel programming in Python to optimise run-time, and designed the front-end UI using Panopticon.
What immediately struck me was the global footprint of the business. After we had finished our proof of concept, I had the opportunity to present it in a monthly sales call to colleagues in New York, Cleveland and Montreal, and a few weeks later, I presented to our Hong Kong office.
All this work culminated into a final presentation to the CEO, President, COO, Global Head of Professional Services and the Global Head of Sales. I felt proud to present a product that we worked so hard on, especially to an audience comprised of senior leadership. Ultimately it was a great send-off, and I am delighted to have been involved in the creation of a new product which expands on the current risk offering.
Timur Uyumaz
I chose TS Imagine’s intern program with the primary goal of developing my programming skills and gaining a better understanding of what it takes to transform a great idea into a real-life solution. This experience has helped me gain a further understanding of finance and has encouraged me to convey my thoughts and ideas.
Although I had programmed in several languages previously, JavaScript was not one of them, so the first few days were spent learning the syntax. I familiarised myself with the in-house JavaScript API (the TS Imagine Financial Platform) and learned how to interact with the core risk product.
As much of our project involved code development, it was important to learn good practices such as version control. I had the freedom to expand beyond the original scope and implement my own ideas with the guidance of the TS Imagine team.
My experience at TS Imagine has been memorable due to the companies’ dedication to our learning through interaction with team members with a range of experiences, from analysts to the CEO. Everyone at the firm was very welcoming, supportive and knowledgeable so I’m glad I was able to experience the fruitful culture that it had to offer.
Whether it was improving my understanding of how the various teams support one another or concluding the internship by presenting my work to the C-suite, I have taken much away from my opportunities here. I also enjoyed interning alongside Nicholas who was exceptional at generating ideas and decomposing the project into practical segments.
