Ten years @ Equifax, Why?

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of my employer, past or present.

Written in August 2025, when I had been at Equifax for ten years.

While on vacation, I’ve found myself reflecting on a question I’ve been asked a lot these past few years: Why did I stay at the same company for ten years?

There is no single answer to that question; the decision was based on multiple factors. However, the primary reasons were working with leaders who understood and complemented my way of working, having meaningful work, and being given opportunities to grow.

When I interviewed @ Equifax in May 2015, Sandeep (now Director @ Amazon) asked me why I wanted to join the team. My answer was because I wanted to apply my knowledge around Data mining and neural networks (that I got from college), Hadoop (that I got from my grad internship) and information retrieval systems (which I got from Yahoo! Research), in real world problems. I knew my passion was around data, everything that combines software, data and large scale systems.

The leadership right fit

Early in my career, there have been times I was on the verge of quitting, and it was never about the work itself. It was always because the leadership was not the right fit. I ended up getting the opportunity to change to a different internal leadership which was more fit to my needs.

I have since found my place, with a leadership which understands my professional needs, and myself understanding what they need from me to succeed. A culture of trust and empowerment is really important for me as a professional; and that is only possible with constant communication with your leadership team (not only with your manager) and showing them how passionate you are about the problems they (we) are trying to solve.

Believe me, even in a medium/big corporation such as Equifax you will find different types of culture and leadership style, so knowing yourself to find the right leadership which is aligned with your career needs is extremely important, and always remember the need to succeed is bidirectional. In my experience, I’ve always valued three things most: the freedom to be myself, receiving honest and constructive feedback, and being able to collaboratively discuss which problems to focus on.

Meaningful work

I feel fortunate to have worked on initiatives with high visibility and impact. While these projects come with significant responsibility, they also allow me to see the immediate impact of my work. I started my career as a big data engineer contributing to the construction of the big data platform in the USA 🇺🇸, Canada 🇨🇦 and Australia 🇦🇺. The tech leads and managers constantly emphasized how our work was helping the organization reach the next level in analytics, enabling new use cases that were not possible before.

After that, I transitioned to creating big data analytical tools that help to develop models and attributes at scale by leveraging our big data platform, which processed terabytes of data. By this point in my career, I was senior enough to understand how my work was directly contributing to the company’s success in that area. The collaboration with the Data & Analytics organization became a key aspect of my role.

Cloud migration was underway, and I shifted to a more focused individual contributor role as a Cloud Architect, specializing in Analytical and Data platforms and Tooling for the Global Platforms organization. This transformation opened doors to entirely new areas, including cost management, direct collaboration with Equifax Enterprise Security and Architects, and partnerships with Google Customer Engineers and Product Engineers to resolve complex issues and prioritize new features for GCP.

Finally, as a Chief Analytics Architect, I am now in charge of the technical aspects of the entire EFX Cloud ML/AI Platform (operating across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America). My responsibilities include MLOps, the online backend system, and our new Generative AI platform—both from a platform architecture perspective and in terms of the analytical tools our internal teams are developing.

Opportunities to grow

I’ve always believed that the pace of my career advancement was entirely in my hands because the opportunities have been there, and I was determined to seize them. While talent is important, my experience has shown that hard work and dedication are what truly make the difference. By taking on diverse projects and challenges, I not only honed my technical skills but also developed critical abilities in influence, communication, and strategic reasoning.

Examples of the previous points have been:

Individual contribution: Leading the implementation of the big data platforms based on Hadoop ecosystem. The design and implementation of the Cloud ML/AI platform and tooling.
Global Collaboration: Moved to Australia for 5 months to help the new Equifax acquisition (Veda) to create their big data platforms working close with Australia leadership teams.
Business units partnership: Created a streaming systems based on Kafka and Spark Streaming for Fraud detection, a completely different business unit from the one I belong to.
Cross-functional innovation: Partnering D&A organization to design and implement different ML/AI techniques to solve problems around entity resolution and anomalies detection.
Leading AI Adoption: Leading the initial Vertex AI enablement and adoption in collaboration and close engagement with Equifax Corporate teams and Google Engineers.
Growth together: Conducting dozens of training and hands-on workshops across the board. Organizations being partnered have been: D&A, Product, Security, HR and Corporate; including software engineering centers present in Chile 🇨🇱 and India 🇮🇳.
Talent acquisition: Conducted 100+ interviews for different types of software engineering role.

The journey continues. My next chapter is focused on building a new Generative AI platform and autonomous AI agents.

Final remarks

To conclude, here are some final points worth mentioning:

Even after ten years, I have consistently grown as both a professional and an individual.
The close proximity of the leadership team to the engineering teams has exposed me to challenges that most of the time are very difficult to find.
Cloud adoption has brought diverse challenges with a ton of opportunities of high impact, which makes it a good place to be.
Development experience matters; and the leadership team has constantly been working on enabling the state-of-the-art tooling for the engineers.