Vojtěch Král, Cloud Solutions Architect

I joined Barclays Prague as an intern in 2012. Within 10 weeks I was working on technology that was new to me, at a scale of hundreds of gigabytes of data, and I was offered a graduate position with the business. One of my rotations was in the Research Team, and I chose to stay there.

In 2014, I started working on the Recommender system, a backlog project that fascinated me so much I began to study it in my free time. Within a year, I had improved the current prototype and was leading the project as main coder, architect, persuader and presenter. I attracted another graduate to the project, and together we saw it successfully launched into production. I was proud to see the positive impact it had on our clients.

Next, I decided to force myself to learn AWS because I had no idea about it. I became part of the team building our Data Science platform on AWS  and signed up to implement a bespoke pattern to import terabytes of data from a vendor into our AWS account. In parallel, I was gathering AWS certifications in my free time and gradually becoming one of the most AWS certified people in whole Barclays.

The project opened up with lots of interesting challenges and learnings. I ended up doing a presentation about it to 250 people on stage at AWS re:Invent in Vegas. It was a really amazing experience.

The Cloud expertise I developed earned me an offer to join Barclays’ Cloud Centre of Excellence team and brought me to the UK. Helping the team across the whole of Barclays in their cloud journey really broadened my horizons. And led me to become a Cloud Solution Architect for the Barclays wide enterprise data platform.

Recently, I’ve been working on an extremely challenging design and prototype for a vendor’s tokenization/ detokenization solution on Cloud. It was a high-profile proof of concept, with interest from the most senior levels of Barclays. The main challenge was to satisfy all aspects of the brief at the same time. To deliver something that performs well, and conforms to Barclays standards, but is also secure, useable and easy to maintain.

I had to bring together the vendor and AWS on regular calls to define the right solution. You couldn’t search for the answers online! It stretched my knowledge and problem-solving skills big time, but I absolutely loved it. And when the prototype went live, it was absolutely amazing to see.

It stretched my knowledge & problem-solving skills big time, but I absolutely loved it.