Principal Engineer – Apps and Partnerships – A Day in the Life: Shambhu Shrestha

“I consider myself a jack of all trades and this role enables me to wear many hats. I also have many opportunities to learn new things, exchange ideas or hear feedback, whether it’s from my projects, my colleagues or our clients, and partners in the Beacon App store.”

Typical Day

First Things

  • Start my day early between 4 a.m. to 4:30 a.m by responding to overnight emails from colleagues and customers in the U.S. and Europe.
  • Do some reading. I read several books at a time – often juggling among them.
  • Prepare my son for school, drop him off at the bus stop, and head to the nearby gym for swimming and weight training.

Mids

  • Work mainly with Tokyo team members on various projects through video calls and a focus on development. 
  • Ensure clients are responded to in a timely manner and keep a watch on anything that is escalated by our client support team.
  • Keep up with new and rapidly evolving developments across the Beacon technology stack including Front Office Suite, Core Platform, and Infrastructure. Participate in discussions and review new code committed across all these to constantly update myself.
  • Meet in-person for lunch and/or team activities with Tokyo team members periodically to keep the team spirit alive.

Last Things

  • Engage in casual discussions with clients or team members across Beacon to generate new ideas. 
  • Explore these new ideas and brainstorm on existing problems. 
  • Spend time training internal team members and customers, keep documentation up-to-date and mentor junior team members.

Position

I work on the Apps and Partnerships team as the principal engineer; I’m the longest serving Beacon employee regionally. I have a diverse range of responsibilities from planning, designing, and delivering strategically important projects to Beacon’s Apps and Partnerships business as well as ensuring that Beacon Tokyo has a strong engineering team capable of spearheading strategic projects and serving clients not only in the region, but across the globe.

Great Startup Opportunities

I worked at various start-ups when I was a student. After graduation, I spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs in various roles on the sell side and the buy side. While I was there, I learned about SecDB and became very intrigued by its technology. When the opportunity arose years later to join Beacon, two aspects appealed to me. One was to be able to contribute to Beacon’s development in its early days and second, Beacon’s culture was similar to what I was accustomed to at Goldman: a focus on excellence, teamwork, helping one another, and independence. I was really excited by the opportunity and jumped on it.

I consider myself a jack of all trades and this role enables me to wear many hats. I also have many opportunities to learn new things, exchange ideas or hear feedback, whether it’s from my projects, my colleagues or our clients, and partners in the Beacon App store. This really motivates me. I’m also really excited to be part of a growing company that allows me to do what I can to help it achieve goals but also evolve. 

Upcoming Goals

I look forward to helping the Beacon App Store grow. There’s a lot to do. It has so much potential for innovation with so many great ideas to accomplish. I want to see this through. On a personal level, I’d like to take up meditation and continue wading through my long list of books to read. 

Fast Trivia:

Music

I don’t have a specific preference; I listen to all kinds of music. But 75% of the time I listen to existing playlists with 25% spent on discovering new ones.

Movie/TV

Movies: The Godfather Trilogy, The Usual Suspects, Memento, and Pulp Fiction

TV: Breaking Bad, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, and Gomorrah

Books

Fiction: The Catcher in the Rye, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Nonfiction: A Brief History of Time, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The Lessons of History, The Beginning of Infinity – Explanations that Transform the World, Fooled by Randomness and Meditations

Favorite Trips

Hiking/Trekking. My Everest Base Camp trek was memorable.

Food

Japanese/Italian/Indian/Nepalese

Favorite Things

Hiking, reading, and spending time with my family

Little Known Fact

I can stare at the horizon without thinking about much for hours on end.

Joined Beacon

May 2017

Education

Tokyo Institute of Technology: Bachelors/Masters in Computer Engineering

CFA Institute: CFA Charterholder

Hometown

Kathmandu, Nepal

Work Location

Tokyo