Diversity in Tech - It Will Happen to You

This month, Achievers Tech is extremely excited to be hosting OANDA Corporation (http://www.oanda.com/)'s VP of Engineering and Operations, Natasha Lala (http://ca.linkedin.com/in/natashalala).

Diversity is often presented as a series of affirmative action initiatives or a statistical analysis of the workplace. What is frequently missed is how diversity can benefit an organization, as well as some of the potential pitfalls that can arise.

This talk will focus on a practical example of how diversity matters to those of us in a technical field, using the case study of a complex foreign exchange trading system several oceans away. As a small, agile development shop in Toronto, OANDA was tasked to deploy their high frequency trading system inside a multinational bank in Hong Kong. This involved a variety of technical, geographical, and cultural challenges for which diversity was both the problem and solution.

Natasha is responsible for the technical teams that build and run the software for a foreign exchange trading system that transacts billions of dollars a day. She has also led large scale projects in the CRM, telecom, and financial industries for SOMA Networks (http://www.somanetworks.com/) and IBM (http://www.ibm.com/ca/en/). Throughout her career, she has been responsible for technology deployments all over the world including: Canada, The United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. It's safe to say that she likes to travel too ;)

Doors open at 6:00 and talk will begin at 6:30 sharp. As always, drinks and snacks will be served!