I’m Ben Lvovsky, an architecture and technology leader in financial markets technology. I am based in Melbourne and open to Sydney.

My career started in the markets. In 1999 I built a broadcaster that pushed live market data to online traders. It became the subject of my provisional patent. At Paritech I led the technology behind PULSE, the broker terminal built to replace IRESS at CommSec, and CommSec’s Professional Trader. I then worked on wealth, money-markets and hedge-fund systems for the Commonwealth Bank group, NAB, JBWere Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund. I have traded equities, options, futures and FX myself since 1999, and I have never stopped writing my own research software. The full record is on the financial markets page.

The last decade has been cloud and data architecture and leadership. 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. Before that I was Head of Cloud at iSelect.

Alongside that, I’m a PhD candidate in software engineering at RMIT University. My research is on multi-agent LLM systems for privacy and security in software delivery: whether specialised language-model agents arguing with each other can find the sensitive data that leaks through tickets, logs and repositories. I apply the same adversarial pattern to markets in Market Synthesis, an adversarial debate system for macro-financial regime detection.

The writing

The essays here are about the parts of the job that don’t fit in a pull request: architecture decisions that quietly become permanent, metrics that reward the wrong behaviour, and incidents that turn out to have been misdiagnosed for months. Everything is in the first person because all of it comes from somewhere specific. Where a story involves a client or a colleague, the details are changed enough that they aren’t identifiable.

Getting in touch

Every article has comments open at the bottom, backed by GitHub Discussions. Corrections are especially welcome — several of these pieces exist because somebody told me I was wrong about something.