Mathieu brings a varied career path and a deep love of building for the web to Tower Research Capital. From overseeing web development for a data center management platform to consulting for a major bank, he has spent his career at the intersection of engineering leadership and hands-on building. Now a Front-End Technical Lead at Tower, he helps guide the team behind Tower’s unified web application framework, building tools for use across our Trading, Core Engineering, and Support organizations.

Read on for Mathieu’s perspective on pragmatic engineering, cross-team collaboration, and what it takes to grow into technical leadership. To learn more about careers at Tower, explore here.

Tell us a bit about your career journey and what led you to join Tower.

I have a bit of a non-standard background. I studied mechanical engineering because I had a passion for it, but the only class I remember truly loving was my C++ class. I’ve been programming since I was 12 years old; when the internet was born, I knew at that exact moment I would someday become a software developer.

Out of school, I joined Dassault Systèmes, where I was able to merge both worlds, doing C++ automation for their CAD software. From there I moved to Maya Heat Transfer Technology, building C++ automation tools for parametric combustor analysis, before transitioning into web development – leading a five-year project to manage data centers using WebGL 3D technology. That’s when I really came to understand the power of building tools for the web.

Eventually, I worked as a consultant for Société Générale, which brought me into the world of finance and ultimately led me to Tower.

What do you find most exciting about your role as a Tech Lead, and what kinds of problems does your team get to solve?

For me, the most exciting part of being a Tech Lead is seeing how web development can directly simplify people’s jobs and lives. I’ve been fascinated by the web for a long time, and I’m lucky to have a team that shares that same passion. At Tower, we get to build tools for a massive variety of teams – everyone from Core Engineering and Support to Trading. It’s fascinating work, but it presents a major challenge: creating a unified solution for building a diverse range of web applications quickly, with a consistent UX that’s easy to maintain and scale.

But what I love most about my role is the culture we’ve built around this work. I try to foster an environment where everyone feels safe to make mistakes, brainstorm openly, and find solutions on their own. The magic happens when we learn from both the right calls and the wrong ones, together.

What technical skills, languages or engineering principles are most important when building scalable enterprise applications for a fast-paced trading environment like Tower?

The absolute golden rule for our team is pragmatism over perfection, or more simply, the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. In a fast-paced environment, it’s incredibly easy to overengineer. Almost every problem has both a simple solution and a deeply complex one, and unless complexity is strictly necessary, we take the simpler path so we don’t spend too much time on things that don’t add immediate value.

That said, we draw a clear line between foundations and features. If a system is going to be around for a long time and be used by other teams as a building block, we invest the extra time in making it robust and easily discoverable. Once those foundations are set, we want the layers on top to stay lightweight so we can iterate rapidly and even start over if a feature doesn’t work out. That philosophy is what drove us to build our full-stack web framework at Tower, which has enabled our team and others to bring clean, reliable applications into production in a fraction of the time.

What does effective collaboration look like between your team and the other technical and trading groups you work with at Tower?

One of my favorite things about Tower is how people react when the pressure is on. Nobody wants to see a bug in production, but there’s something beautiful about how quickly everyone comes together as one team to get back to an operational state. There’s zero finger-pointing; everyone just rolls up their sleeves to help.

In this new AI era, it’s easy to get caught up in pure automation. But we’re building tools for people, not virtual agents, which means truly listening to human needs is key. I consider everyone at Tower an equal partner. While we collect plenty of usage data on our applications, nothing beats direct human connection – I’m always keen to hop on a quick Google Meet to hear what people think about the tools we’re building. That tight feedback loop is how we build the right things.

As an engineering leader, how do you empower teams to do their best work and continue developing their skills?

For me, empowering a team is all about fostering a culture of active learning and high transparency. I love live showcasing, even the chaotic demos that might fail – it shows the true nature of an application and the real-world decisions behind it. I tell my team: if you don’t feel confident enough to demo it, you’re not ready yet, so go back and refine it.

Tower is also a great employer for actively encouraging us to train and keep learning. Every year I attend a web conference and urge my team to do the same, because you only need a tiny spark to start a fire – a single idea from a panel or a networking conversation can be the catalyst for something amazing. On a day-to-day basis, though, true knowledge transmission happens through thoughtful code reviews. As a leader, it also means knowing when to pick up the phone for a quick sync so we don’t let key details slip.

What advice would you give to engineers who want to grow into technical leadership roles?

To be honest, becoming a Tech Lead was never a milestone I set out to chase; I’ve always been driven by pure passion. If you want to grow into leadership, don’t focus on the title – focus on the craft and the people.

Follow your curiosity: work hard and let your genuine interest in solving problems guide you. Step outside your bubble by going to conferences, learning from others, and building your network – this takes time, but keeping in touch with the people who impact you is invaluable. And stay interested in people in general, because the more interested you are in those around you, the better you’ll become holistically.