Ben Lvovsky Ben Lvovsky
Architecture and technology leader — financial markets
I have built for the markets since 1999: live market data for online traders, the broker terminal built to replace IRESS at CommSec, wealth, money-markets and hedge-fund systems. The last decade has been cloud and data architecture and leadership. I am a domain expert, an architect and a leader in one, and I still build the proof of concept myself.
- Melbourne, open to Sydney
- Australian citizen
- Baseline security clearance
Highlights
- Markets systems. I led the technology, design and development of PULSE, the live-data broker terminal built to replace IRESS at CommSec, and of CommSec’s Professional Trader. Before that I built a market-data broadcaster for online trading, the subject of my provisional patent.
- Architecture today. At Slater and Gordon the master data platform is my own concept and design. It is approved as the firm’s architecture direction, with the first horizon in production. I also own the firm’s Azure cloud and integration strategy.
- Leadership. As Head of Cloud at iSelect I led the cloud and DevSecOps function and brought it back in-house. Earlier I built engineering teams from zero, onshore and offshore.
- Trading and research. I have traded equities, options, futures and FX since 1999. My research includes Market Synthesis, an adversarial multi-agent LLM system for macro-financial regime detection, and a public Markowitz portfolio optimiser.
Writing
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"It Takes Too Long for Serverless" — Usually Doesn't
The 15-minute limit is a signal the problem needs rethinking, not the infrastructure scaling up. Five scenarios, three patterns.
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The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem
A Pontiac owner's car wouldn't start, but only when he bought vanilla ice cream. The pattern was real; the explanation was wrong. That gap is where four-hour outages live.
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How Jira Metrics Slowly Killed Creativity on My Team
Over a couple of years our culture shifted from "let's find the best way to solve this" to "let's close the ticket." The good engineers left, velocity went up, and nothing in the reporting system ever showed a decline.
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How Docker Compose Quietly Undoes a Cloud Migration
The architecture diagram says managed services. Every developer's laptop says Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis and a Compose file. You can pay for a cloud migration and still develop on-premises — and the people doing it are usually the ones senior enough to know better.