Clauda Ephrem’s career at Tower began as an intern, and after more than 16 years, she’s still energized by the engineering challenges at the heart of our business. She’s grown her career by staying curious, taking on new challenges, and following opportunities from software engineering and production support to her current role: Director of Technology Operations Americas. In this position, she helps ensure Tower’s core engineering operations move efficiently from idea to production, with the coordination and rigor needed in a high-speed quantitative trading setting.

She’s drawn to work that demands an end-to-end mindset and collaboration, where solving the hardest problems means thinking beyond a single domain and learning alongside people who push you to get better.

Read on for Clauda’s perspective on building a lasting career, what makes engineering at Tower distinctive, and the technical and cultural standards that have helped us succeed over the long term. To learn more about careers at Tower, explore here.

You originally joined Tower as an intern and have been here for over 16 years. If you could narrow it down to three words or phrases, what has kept you here for so long?

If I had to narrow it down to three, I would say: evolving opportunities, mentorship, and the people. As an intern, I had a chance to work on meaningful projects from my very first day, and over time I’ve been able to shift from software engineering to production support to broader program leadership as my interests grew and the firm’s needs evolved. At each step, I’ve had strong mentors and leaders who helped me figure out where I could have the most impact and encouraged me to take on new responsibilities. Through it all, the culture has stayed consistent in the best way: you’re surrounded by smart, driven, genuinely collaborative people who raise your game and make Tower a place you want to keep showing up for.

What makes Tower an interesting place for engineers who want to work on hard, real-world problems?

Tower is interesting because the problems are both real and complex – even as an intern, you’re never solving trivial issues, and you almost never reach a solution without taking a multidisciplinary approach. Many of the most meaningful challenges demand an end-to-end mindset, where you have to understand how systems behave in the real world, how different teams interact, and what the ideal outcome looks like in practice, not just in code form.

There’s also a strong growth culture here: it’s normal to identify where you want to get better, ask for help, and find the right people and projects to build new skills. Because the stakes are high, there’s a real premium on creativity. The best solutions often come from thinking differently and iterating until you land on something that’s both elegant and practical.

For someone earlier in their career, what advice would you give about building a lasting career in a place like Tower?

Stay relentlessly curious, and don’t treat your first role as the box you’ll live in forever. The people who build long careers here tend to ask a lot of questions – not just about their immediate work, but about how the business functions, how the technology fits together, and why decisions get made the way they do.

It also helps to evaluate opportunities with an open mind, because some of the most valuable growth comes from projects that feel slightly adjacent to what you thought you’d do. If you’re willing to take on new challenges, stretch into unfamiliar areas and keep learning, you’ll naturally become more versatile. That versatility is what makes you resilient and enables you to deliver long-term value in a fast-moving environment.

After many years at Tower, what standards – technical or cultural – do you think have mattered most to the firm’s long-term success?

The biggest constant is the quality of the people. Hiring and developing smart, motivated specialists who take pride in their craft has an outsized effect on everything else. But it’s not just individual talent. Tower’s success also depends on a culture that values open communication and real collaboration across functions, because the hardest problems often don’t funnel cleanly into siloed teams. On the technical side, there’s a persistent expectation of excellence: strong engineering fundamentals, thoughtful problem-solving, and a bias toward doing things the right way rather than the quickest way.

Culturally, I’d add shared ownership and humility – a willingness to take responsibility for outcomes, share credit, and stay open to being wrong, because that’s what keeps teams improving over time.