Recognition

What colleagues
say.

These are the unedited words from two separate manager nominations for the Orion Technology Q1 Performance Excellence Award — an internal recognition given to engineers who go beyond their defined role. Nominated once, won once.

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Company Recognition · Orion Advisor Solutions · 2024

Bahamas Trip Winner

Outstanding engineering leadership and sustained impact across distributed teams.

Q1 Performance Excellence · Visionaries Nomination · Orion Technology

Nomination — submitted by my direct manager

RoleLead Developer
Business LineOrion Tech
Tenure at nomination6 Years

“When the stakes are high and the changes are risky, she steps in like a deployment ninja — calm, confident, and always in control.”

Why She Was Nominated

Yesenia is the lead developer for the Trade Execution Development Squad. She is an excellent lead developer for that squad, but that is not why she was nominated for performance excellence. She was nominated because of her impact for the entire department.

Yesenia is capable of understanding complex things and will seek issues to resolve, even if they are not in her area. She has a natural ability to create capacity to perform her role at an expert level, and still help other areas of the business. She continuously helps with testing issues, pre-prod down issues, DevOps that needs help, and infrastructure bottlenecks.

Specific Examples

Team Changes

People leaving, without backfill, global workforce, and RTO. She is always a light when the team needs one most.

Trunk-Based Branching Strategy

Recently switched to trunk-based branching strategy — a change to how the SDLC operates and how code gets released to production. This took a huge effort by many people. Yesenia took leadership, made sure she helped move the project by doing her part, then also helping those around her.

Security & Library Updates

These changes are very risky and difficult to test, and therefore many people shy away from owning them. Yesenia seems to enjoy these challenges. She takes ownership and makes them go smooth. We would have a much more difficult time making these important updates without her.

Reason for Recognition

Security Changes

We have had some high impact, hard to test items such as library updates. These projects are hard to put your name on — to know with confidence they are ready. But Yessie takes these projects, loves to prove she can commit to making sure they go smooth. Without her these would be much more difficult to get completed.

DevOps

With DevOps reporting outside our group, it takes more energy to coordinate and collaborate with them. Yesenia does this better than anyone I have seen.

Production Issues

It does not matter if we have production issues that have anything to do with her team — she is always taking ownership, and amazing at troubleshooting to quickly resolve issues.

Trade Execution

The team she leads recently had 2 weeks with volumes 3 to 6 times the normal daily volume. The project her and her team did to refactor this process was proven as quality, scalable, and durable. She continues to hit home runs for us, making our platform perform well under unprecedented pressures.

Culture

So many changes, and our eNPS has suffered as a result. Yesenia is a constant joy to be around. She is capable of de-escalating, and making everyone around her better.

Manager Summary

Key Achievements: Her team is scaling trade execution with the audacious goal of allowing users to execute over 1 million trades at one time. At the time of this nomination, we were at about 700K trades and expected 1 million to be done very soon. While this is an amazing team accomplishment, it is really the achievements Yesenia provides outside her normal team and squad responsibilities that stand out.

“All in all, Yesenia is just a leader. She leads by example, with passion, and with an emotional IQ that makes everyone feel great. Her technical abilities, added to the leadership skills, has bailed us out of problems so many times, and has created a culture of excellence that needs to be recognized.”

Second nomination · one year later
Q1 Performance Excellence · Q1 Winners · Orion Technology

Q1 Winner — submitted by my direct manager

RoleLead Developer
Business LineOrion Technology
Tenure at nomination7.5 Years

“She exemplifies what a visionary contributor looks like. Someone who sees beyond their defined role, rises to meet challenges that others cannot, and elevates everyone around them in the process.”

Core Nomination Summary

Yesenia is the Lead Developer for the Trade Tools team. She led her team to exceed their average productivity in the last 7 out of 10 months. Her leadership was instrumental in delivering Volumes 2 & 3 of the Order Management System, directly impacting the core trading infrastructure — delivering a robust and scalable product.

She drove new features for OCI, reducing the need for power of attorney agreements, eliminating a barrier. She has a motion-oriented mindset, balancing deep development work and production hygiene with technical solutioning and mentoring. This hands-on approach ensures quality is maintained across everything she does.

The Cetera Story

When a critical compliance and trading integration issue surfaced for client Cetera, the challenge quickly outpaced what three product managers and multiple members of the service and relationship teams were able to address. The issue was deeply technical and required engineering-level fluency to even diagnose.

Yesenia volunteered to step in — at the time already actively managing 12+ concurrent epics and projects. Despite that workload, she didn't hesitate. She engaged directly with the Cetera team, facilitated hands-on testing sessions, managed the client relationship with professionalism and care, and drove the issue all the way through to resolution.

Cetera was not just satisfied — they were ecstatic. They specifically called out Yesenia and her work.

Key Achievements

Trade Execution Scaling

The project her and her team did to refactor the trade execution process was proven as quality, scalable, and durable — handling volumes 3 to 6 times the normal daily volume. Goal: 1 million simultaneous trades.

OMS Volumes 2 & 3

Delivered the Order Management System Volumes 2 and 3, directly impacting core trading infrastructure.

Cheetah Integration

Championed trade files integration that enabled the trading platform to integrate with trust accounting platform Cheetah — opening a whole new line of business for Orion.

Team Productivity

Led team to exceed average productivity in 7 out of 10 months through a period of significant organizational change.

Culture

So many changes, and our eNPS had suffered as a result. Yesenia is a constant joy to be around. She is capable of de-escalating, and making everyone around her better.

Core Nomination Summary, Continued

The outcome speaks for itself. Cetera was not just satisfied — they were ecstatic. They took the time to communicate directly how exceptional the experience was, and specifically called out Yesenia and her work. That kind of client feedback reflects the type of impact that strengthens relationships and builds lasting trust.

She embodies the spirit of the award by combining experienced technical skill with a move-it-forward approach. She has led her team through organizational change, a focus on production hygiene, and mentoring newer partners.

Her ability to draw out solutions, collaborate in a genuine way, and keep things moving are just some of the things that make Yesenia an asset to the organization. She exemplifies what a visionary contributor looks like — someone who sees beyond their defined role, rises to meet challenges that others cannot, and elevates everyone around them in the process.

For Employers

Yes, I have a side business. Here's why that's not a conflict.

I get that it looks like a lot. Lead Engineer at a FinTech company, three kids, and building a community and products on the side. Here are the questions I actually get asked.

Doesn't a side business mean you're distracted at work?

The day job and the side work make each other better. At Orion I'm building enterprise systems handling $5.2T in assets — that's the hands-on experience that makes what I teach credible. Teaching forces you to understand things deeply enough to explain them. That makes me a sharper engineer, not a distracted one. The performance record above is what that actually looks like.

How does this benefit a company that hires you?

Every engineer who builds in public is sharpening their skills constantly. Building a product with AI tools means I understand the developer workflow our customers use. I bring that context back. The communication and leadership skills from running a public-facing brand transfer directly to leading engineering teams — I've seen that play out.

What's your take on AI and engineering careers?

AI doesn't replace engineers — it changes what they need to know. The engineers who matter in five years understand systems deeply enough to know what AI got wrong, why a database schema won't scale, why the architecture that looked fine at 10K users breaks at 10M. I keep my engineering skills sharp precisely because I'm also teaching others to use AI tools.

Where does the time come from?

I build in stolen hours — car line, lunch break, 11pm when the house is quiet. Three kids means I don't have the luxury of wasted time. Every decision has to justify itself. I ship faster because of constrained windows, not despite them. My performance record at Orion reflects that.

Want to see the full technical picture?

The résumé has the metrics, the stack, the specific impact numbers, and 8+ years of FinTech engineering experience in detail.

View résumé →