Eight Questions: João Peixoto, Engineering Manager and Lead
Leslie Ankney, Communications Lead
Welcome to Eight Questions, where we profile individual members of the Anchorage Digital team, diving into their career paths, what brought them to crypto, and what makes them tick. Why eight? Because it’s the number of decimal places a bitcoin can be divided into. It’s also the last single digit number in a Fibonacci Sequence, and we like that.
Next in our series, meet João Peixoto, better known as JP, who is an Engineering Manager and Lead at Anchorage Digital and has been with us for over three years. He’s played an important role building Anchorage asset support, product development, and API platforms. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the Technical University of Lisbon. Prior to Anchorage, JP was an Engineering Manager and Software Engineer at Thousand Eyes (now acquired by Cisco). Why is Anchorage his favorite company to work at thus far? Read on to find out more.
- What was your experience with crypto before joining the team?
Very technological. I got started by “paper hopping”, first reading the bitcoin whitepaper and then the others it references such as Hashcash. That was my first exposure to crypto, and from there, I did some deeper dives playing around with things like Hyperledger in its beta form as a personal project. I thought working in crypto someday would be cool, because I could see many similarities in blockchains with my studies in distributed systems. I wondered: How would you run blockchains at scale? How would it all fit?
2. You’ve famously shared some adorable pictures of your newborn daughter in various themed-costumes with the team. What’s your favorite costume so far and anything planned for Halloween?
My favorite costume so far was when we dressed her as a little cow. My partner and I have always done couples outfits for Halloween, so this year is big as our first one with the baby. We’ve already started planning and have a couple of options, no spoilers. The thing is, with babies, you could try making them the scariest thing, and it’ll always turn out cute.
3. What’s an outside work experience that helped you grow as a leader?
In college, I got into the video game World of Warcraft, one of the first massive multiplayer online games where you could play with people around the world simultaneously. When you’re playing, we’re talking about managing forty people for hours straight dealing with politics, egos, team rotations, skillset management, reward fairness. Because I started leading a team in-game as a young adult, I was exposed to a lot of different personalities and some players really took it seriously. I had to learn how to diffuse situations and notice strengths and weaknesses in people, things I still do as a leader on our engineering team now.
4. What have been some of the most interesting problems you’ve worked on solving at Anchorage?
Where to start, there are so many! As you can imagine, being part of Anchorage since the beginning means the work changes over time. At first, my focus was security, but at a totally new level than anything I’d worked on in the past. Suddenly, we were talking about rogue nation-level attacks and how to protect our clients.
As our product offering evolved, it was really fulfilling for me to work on connecting the distributed, financial, and security worlds. When we work on our collateral management product, for example, we’re talking about mitigating financial risk. A poor system can trigger actions like liquidations that can have a big impact on clients. What our clients need is near real-time data processing, and solving how to make this possible is both interesting and rewarding, as every improvement makes our product more useful to them.
5. What keeps you motivated? What advice would you give to engineers early in their careers?
Having a steady stream of interesting problems to solve. I’m a problem solver at heart and seeing the interesting problems we have ahead keeps me continuously motivated. I’m working with kind and smart people that give me such a great environment to work in and stay motivated.
You really took me back when you asked that question. You need to learn how to learn. It’s not about knowing one technology or framework end-to-end, it’s more about how quickly you can learn something new. The ability to not be tied to what you know and become defensive is the biggest advice I could give new engineers.
6. What’s it like working across the distributed, remote first Anchorage team?
It’s a humbling experience as it puts us all at the same level. The visual cues that usually influence relationships, like your height or what you’re wearing really don’t matter in a distributed environment. Instead, you need to empathize and figure out how to communicate, lead, and build trust through a camera. We’re all starting from the same point adapting to remote work, and that’s actually refreshing. With the expansion to Portugal and more employees in new time zones, it’s brought new learning opportunities such as how to minimize feedback cycles so we can coordinate effectively across the company.
7. Growing up and completing university in Portugal to working in America, what are some of the interesting cross-cultural differences and similarities you’ve noticed between the two countries?
There’s a big difference in how we react to failure. In the US, failure is perceived as an improvement opportunity. If you’ve failed before, it’s highly likely that you won’t make the same mistake again and it’s important to have an environment where it’s safe to make some kinds of mistakes and to ask questions. In Portugal, failure has a lot of stigma to it. If you mess up once, it’s an uphill battle from there.
As for similarities, I’ve noticed in both Portugese and American cultures, people at Anchorage are relentless until they find a solution. The team spirit is also quite similar. I think in both cultures, people realize it’s virtually impossible for someone to do something by themselves, especially under the stakes we work in at Anchorage. I think that’s a key reason why our expansion has been so successful. The thinking around technical problems is a common ground for understanding.
8. You and Anchorage co-founder and President, Diogo Monica went to the same university. How has Diogo changed since then?
We attended the same year with different majors and met at university. Diogo’s major and mine had a lot of overlap, his major focused more on networks and mine focused on distributed systems so we ended up with many of the same classmates and professors.
Diogo hasn’t changed a bit since university, he’s high energy and can engage anyone explaining complicated topics. He was literally like that since university.
Interested in programming the future of finance with JP? Anchorage Digital is hiring for a variety of roles, check our job opportunities here.
Disclaimer: Holdings of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are speculative and involve a substantial degree of risk, including the risk of complete loss. There can be no assurance that any cryptocurrency, token, coin, or other crypto asset will be viable, liquid, or solvent. Nothing in this communication is intended to imply that any asset held in custody by Anchorage is low-risk or risk-free. Digital assets held in custody are not guaranteed by Anchorage Digital Bank National Association and are not FDIC-insured.
