Last year, Commonwealth Bank appointed more than 800 new engineers as part of a bold new recruitment plan. This year, the recruitment target is even larger.
Commonwealth Bank set itself the aggressive recruitment target of appointing 100 new engineers each month to help the bank deliver on its strategy of providing the global best digital experiences to customers.
CBA has appointed new engineers across a range of disciplines including cyber, data/AI and cloud.
To help deliver against the evolving and increasingly complex digital needs of its customers, CBA has set itself the goal of appointing 1,000 new engineers this year – and so far it is right on track by hiring over 100 engineers every month in Australia.
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Further, to support and oversee this growing network of engineers, the bank has expanded its team of ‘Distinguished Engineers’.
In June last year, the bank announced its plans to create a new network of ‘Distinguished Engineers’. Those with this title would represent the pinnacle of the engineering profession and be responsible for helping the bank deliver on its strategy of becoming a global leader in technology.
Distinguished Engineer: Commonwealth Bank’s Chief Information Officer of Technology, Brendan Hopper, was the first person given the newly created title
Since that time, the bank’s team of Distinguished Engineers has swelled to 9.
Most recently, the bank appointed industry stalwart, Phillip Grasso-Nguyen, as a Distinguished Engineer and General Manager for Engineering Technology.
With more than 25 years’ experience, Mr Grasso-Nguyen has worked for many different tech companies, including the last 14 years at global giant Google, where he held various senior positions in software development as well as networking and site reliability engineering.
As a newly appointed Distinguished Engineer, Mr Grasso-Nguyen is required to provide technical and thought leadership to help the bank deliver on its technology strategy.
“Being a Distinguished Engineer isn’t just about experience, it’s about giving our engineers a voice through strong leadership and mentoring so they are empowered to grow their careers and create new innovative products and services for our customers,” Mr Grasso-Nguyen said.
Learning from Big Tech
For example, Grasso-Nguyen is embedding best practice lessons learnt at Google to uplift the reliability principles at the bank using Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
“Tech giants and large software firms are rapidly trying to adapt SRE practices to the next level and I’m here to help apply SRE the right way for our customers by uplifting our practices, hiring the right talent and growing that talent.”
As an ex-Googler, Mr Grasso-Nguyen said he is an advocate for experimentation and building a life-long learning mindset.
He recently hired an all-star team of female engineering leaders and is driving never-seen-before automation across the bank to create the best developer experience for the bank’s engineers.
“We want to be the best technology-led bank in Australia, if not the world.
We can’t do this by going down the same paths that we’re familiar with. We need to push for more diversity and inclusion and attract people who don’t necessarily look and think like us…then empower them to experiment and be comfortable with failing, learning and iterating. It’s the only way we can truly innovate and become the bank of tomorrow,” he said.
