What's your job about?

Westpac is one of the leading banks in Australia and provides a wide range of banking and financial services to customers in a growing digital landscape. Being in the graduate program, I’m given the opportunity to explore the large variety of technology spaces that exist in the bank. 

In my current role, I work as a front-end developer for one of our Financial Market platforms, and work with the team’s Solution Designer and Product Owner to implement features and fixes that enhance the user experience. The team works closely with our internal business users, and it feels rewarding to be able to see the direct impact of my work.

After I am assigned an issue, I do a walkthrough with the designer and ensure I understand the work that needs to be done. I will then make the required changes and create a Pull Request, which allows me to get feedback from other engineers on my code. Once that’s approved, the feature goes into our test environment where the product owner and solution designer can test that it meets the requirements and see if any of the requirements needs to be changed. We work in an iterative process until the feature is signed off and ready to be shipped to users.

What's your background?

I grew up in the Central West of New South Wales and moved to Wollongong to pursue my passion for technology at university. 

I’ve loved computers since I was a kid. It started with me and my cousins creating PowerPoint presentations and showing them off to each other. I then fell in love with gaming and eventually wanted to create my own games, so I took up software subjects in high school. 
My software teacher had recommended to me that I apply for the National Computer Science Summer School (NCSS). I doubted myself that I couldn’t do it, and that it was too far away as it was in Sydney, but on the last day I sent through my application and I got in. This was my first time being away from family so I was extremely nervous, but I had a lot of fun and I got to meet people that I still talk to today. 

After I graduated from high school I moved to Wollongong for university, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I was lucky enough to be selected for the Westpac Young Tech Scholar program, which is how I was introduced to the company and was able to meet and hear from so many different people about their experiences in the industry. I loved it so much that I decided to apply for the graduate program, which is how I’m here today.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Absolutely! There are so many aspects to technology that range from technical roles to more business roles. Each role has room for growth and for you to learn. All the grads at Westpac have vastly different backgrounds and experiences, and we all bring our own unique perspectives and ideas to the program. What’s important is your ability to work within a team of people that each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and being able to come together to solve a common problem.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

I love getting to work on projects outside of my normal day-to-day. For 3 months, I was in a team with 6 other grads creating a SharePoint site for new joiners in the Westpac Institutional Bank. We worked closely with our project leads in HR to design and develop a site that introduces new joiners to the bank, and direct them to various resources and guides to help them early on. It was so rewarding to get feedback and hear from people who have been working in the bank for years that were still able to learn something from our site

What are the limitations of your job?

Having an iterative work process is great for refining features and bugs, however it can be easy to get trapped in a constant feedback loop. We all want our new features to be perfect for users, however it can get to a point in the testing feedback where we’re wanting to add enhancements that should be separated out into its own issue. This is why it’s important for us to work with our Solution Designer to understand the scope of a particular issue or feature, and to not get caught in expanding our focus.