Edwin Thompson
Software Engineer | Solution Architect
20 years designing enterprise software that millions of people rely on.
Software Engineer | Solution Architect
20 years designing enterprise software that millions of people rely on.
I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Fidelity Investments, where I've led technical strategy and architecture since January 2022 across a portfolio of more than a dozen enterprise applications — software that serves millions of Fidelity customers and hundreds of branch associates every day.
That title took twenty years to build. I started out writing VB.NET and PHP against SQL Server, then moved through application work at UNC Chapel Hill and Peak 10, modernization work at Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and landed at Fidelity in March 2015 as a contract front-end engineer — converting to Senior Software Engineer that September.
What's kept me in this work two decades isn't any one technology — it's the problems nobody's already solved. I'm at my best parachuting into a system nobody fully understands, tracing what it actually does versus what everyone assumes it does, and finding the capability that already exists instead of building something new to replace it.
The same instinct is why I've spent the last few years building AI into how my teams work rather than treating it as a threat to it. I've designed tooling that turns a codebase's own history into architectural knowledge other engineers can actually use, so decisions get made faster and reviewed with more confidence — not automated away.
Twenty years in, I still care most about the same thing I did on day one: taking something confusing and making it something a team can actually build, ship, and stand behind.
Fidelity Investments
Jan 2022 – Present
Fidelity Investments
Sept 2015 – Jan 2022
Converted from a contract front-end engineer role (Mar–Sept 2015).
Bank of America
2014
Wells Fargo
2013
Branch clients needed a single starting point to handle everyday tasks themselves and reach other experiences without searching for them. The site grew from a simple link farm into a fully functional transactional starting point that surfaces prefilled or AI-recommended tasks for the client to act on. An associate can tee up a desired transaction in advance while the client keeps the final say.
A branch client who cannot remember a password, and whose password is not meant to be reset or changed, still needs a way to log in. The flow layers active driver's license data verification with identity verification and a one-time passcode into one continuous sequence. The client ends up logged in exactly as a password would have left them, without ever touching a password.
Software teams often lose a project's planning rationale by the time it ships, leaving delivered work disconnected from the decisions that shaped it. This project applies Spec Driven Development and AI-assisted tooling, via OpenGSD, to link every plan and workflow directly to the codebase it produces. The result is a documented, traceable connection between planning and execution that improves collaboration and reduces errors.
Open to hearing about interesting problems or new opportunities — reach out.