Why Enterprise Engineering is Different (and Harder)

After 15 years building systems at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and BNY Mellon, I've learned that enterprise engineering isn't just startup engineering at scale—it's a fundamentally different discipline.

The Regulatory Reality

When I was building compliance systems at Morgan Stanley, every line of code had to survive not just production traffic, but regulatory audits. The FCA doesn't care about your technical debt—they care whether your short sell monitoring correctly flagged that trade from six months ago.

This changes everything. Your architecture decisions become audit evidence. Your deployment logs become regulatory documentation. Your system design must account for requirements that don't exist in consumer tech: immutable audit trails, cross-jurisdictional compliance, real-time risk calculations that can halt billion-dollar trades.

Legacy as a Feature, Not a Bug

At Deutsche Bank, I led the modernization of risk platforms handling complex data sets that had been accumulating regulatory logic for decades. The temptation was always to rebuild from scratch—clean slate, modern stack, proper architecture.

But legacy systems in banking aren't just old code—they're institutional memory. That seemingly arbitrary calculation in the reconciliation engine? It's encoding a regulatory interpretation from 2008 that took months of legal review to establish. The weird data transformation in the reporting pipeline? It's ensuring compatibility with a regulatory format that three jurisdictions require.

The art is evolving these systems while preserving their institutional knowledge. Not replacing the memory, but augmenting it.

Teams Across Time Zones and Cultures

Building the India engineering footprint for Morgan Stanley's Investment Management Compliance Technology taught me that global teams aren't just about timezone coordination—they're about navigating fundamentally different approaches to risk, hierarchy, and technical decision-making.

The same system architecture discussion happens differently in New York (direct, decision-focused) versus London (process-oriented, consensus-building) versus Mumbai (detail-oriented, hierarchy-aware). Effective enterprise engineering leadership isn't just about technical vision—it's about translating that vision across cultural contexts while maintaining architectural coherence.

The Compound Interest of Platform Thinking

At BNY Mellon, we governed 60+ public-facing websites by establishing Adobe Experience Manager as the unified platform. This wasn't just a technology choice—it was recognizing that in enterprise environments, platform decisions compound over years.

When you're supporting Investment Management, Wealth Management, and Pershing on the same platform, every component design decision ripples across business units. Every API choice affects teams you've never met. Every architectural pattern becomes part of the institutional DNA.

The best enterprise engineers think in decades, not sprints.

What This Means for Engineering Leadership

Enterprise engineering requires a different kind of leadership. You're not just shipping features—you're building systems that outlast your tenure. You're not just managing teams—you're managing institutional knowledge across cultures and time zones. You're not just solving technical problems—you're encoding business logic that must survive regulatory scrutiny.

It's harder than startup engineering because the constraints are tighter and the stakes are higher. But it's also more rewarding because the systems you build become the infrastructure that powers global financial markets.

The next time someone tells you enterprise engineering is "just boring CRUD apps," remind them that boring CRUD apps process trillions of dollars daily and their uptime requirements have more zeros than most startups will ever see.