The people who do the work

Our fearless leader, in it for fintech and blockchain: big-company subject matter without big-company bureaucracy, where talent counts and today's startup is next year's enterprise. Plays only games with a winner, from mafia to anything with a scoreboard.

Still drawn to making something new exist digitally, which shows up in financial dashboards and creative work that refuses a template. Basketball and photography off-duty; he lights up when the conversation turns to a new idea, a car or sport.

Reads the need, builds the plan, delivers it, then goes and asks what could have been better. Has twice learned a language from scratch purely because he was moving there, and will lose an afternoon to a good argument about free will.

Turns an idea into a plan and a plan into a deploy, and describes organising a process as a form of meditation. Understands five languages and has a fascination with neuromarketing, branding, and consumer behaviour.

Constitutionally unable to leave a working thing alone when it could be more interesting, and drawn to the problems with room to invent his own answer. Collects manga and anime figures, and can be derailed indefinitely by a good conspiracy theory.

Not fussy about the industry, as long as the product solves something real and he can move its quality. Will argue any hypothetical that is never going to happen, and knows a startling amount about beer.

Happiest with an empty repository, his own choice of stack and no legacy to inherit, ideally pointed at a finance problem. Plays guitar, keeps Radiohead on, and will drop anything to tell you why Rust was worth the trouble.

Builds the AI tooling the rest of the team codes with, and is happiest automating the thing everyone else does by hand, provided he gets a say in the product too. Cooks anything from scratch, from bolognese to Easter paska.

Came for the mathematics, stayed for the moment a dry page turns into something people enjoy using, and would take a clean canvas over inherited mess every time. Danced ballroom competitively, and will stop mid-sentence for quantum cryptography or Dota.

Drawn to the work made of calculations, models and forecasts, where the business logic is the hard part and the interface is the easy one. Knows his way around crypto and the US markets, and will talk philosophy until somebody stops him.

Left law for the more interesting argument, the one between a clean interface and the logic underneath it. Impossibly stubborn by her own account: the whole room can disagree and she will still see it through.

Wants a project he can hold whole in his head, every architecture decision his own, ideally one that turns a wall of data into a screen you can decide from. Shoots on several cameras, animates in Blender, and occasionally drifts a car.