Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

I was drawn to the FedNow Service because of the ability to improve lives, to help our most vulnerable avoid the cost of alternative financial services, like payday loans and check cashing services — services that cost nearly $200 billion every year. That's a real, tangible positive impact on people's lives.

Recently, we started processing federal disaster relief payments over FedNow. When you talk about impacting lives, that's getting financial relief to folks in what is likely the worst moment of their lives. That's the power of instant payments in action — to have a meaningful impact on the world.

How do I measure that? In a sense you don't need to; every one of those payments is a citizen to whom we helped get support. How do you measure that kind of impact on someone's life?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Also, yes. The mission gives us a purpose that's bigger than ourselves, and in many cases, it connects to personal experience.

I remember when I was just out of college, I kept cash in stashed envelopes to make sure I could pay what I needed to. One of the biggest challenges was managing when my rent was due versus when my pay actually hit my bank account. Being able to get paid and pay my bills in real time would have been game-changing.

Some of my team members have shared similar stories. We regularly talk about our mission. When our first payment to a veteran was processed shortly after launch, we shared it and celebrated.

When our first emergency payment was processed, we shared it and celebrated. When we processed a record number of those payments, we shared and celebrated. The need for those payments is very real, and the ability to help those folks, albeit indirectly, well that's a rare privilege for a technologist.

The new skill that my team and I wanted to explore was using artificial intelligence to automate the process of manual issue triaging. The recent advancements in AI technology have led many enterprises to adopt it without clearly identifying the specific problems it can solve.

Our team's approach was to focus on the problem first and then explore if AI could be a safe and viable solution. As the team responsible for monitoring, logging, alerting and troubleshooting issues related to instant payment transactions on the Federal Reserve's FedNow® Service, we often found that the end-to-end triaging process was time-consuming and burdensome for our site reliability engineers.

They had to sift through various logs, monitoring dashboards, metrics and traces to identify the root cause of customer issues. This repetitive and complex task was taking a toll on the SREs and was also delaying the resolution of customer problems. Automating the triaging process using AI was important to us because it would boost productivity, offload repetitive analysis tasks, enable real-time problem detection and automate root cause analysis.

Autonomous AI agents and models are well-suited for predictive analysis, routine task elimination and continuous learning and adaptation. By implementing such a solution, our operational team could focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in the details of issue sorting.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston actively encourages its employees to upskill and reskill through structured training programs, bootcamps, courses and certifications. Career development goals are a part of our team objectives, performance reviews and rewards for employees willing to learn and apply their newfound knowledge to their day-to-day work.

During every FedNow Program Increment, the last sprint is dedicated to innovation days, where teams can experiment with different prototypes to address any pain points. In the last couple of Program Increments, we were able to take various AI courses to gain a fundamental understanding and get hands-on experience through problem-first based bootcamps.

The learnings we gained through the bootcamps, certifications and courses enabled us to safely and responsibly apply our newfound knowledge during the innovation sprints. We were able to develop a prototype for an autonomous root cause analysis triaging system, leveraging AI-native tools.

This co-pilot for SREs reduced the mean time to detect, mean time to resolve/recover, facilitated faster root cause analysis and improved event correlation. This experience has been invaluable in shaping my professional growth. I have learned how to design, vision and iterate using the latest cutting-edge technologies, such as AI, to solve business problems efficiently.

This has expanded my skill set and has given me a deeper understanding of how to leverage emerging technologies to address real-world challenges in the financial technology industry.

I came to the Fed in 2016 and fell in love with the culture here. The work is stimulating and challenging, and everyone has a voice at the table to help drive the direction of the new financial system we are creating.

Fortunately, I've had a positive experience in my software engineering career. I've worked primarily in the aerospace and finance industries. When I was first starting out, I asked tons of questions, and I found people I connected with on a personal level.

These were the people who guided me both in improving my technical skills and in my career overall. As the only woman on some teams, I did not always feel included initially. So I dove into the work and focused on excellence and meeting milestones.

With every successful project we completed, I built my team's trust and confidence in my abilities. I'm an introspective person, so one challenge for me has been speaking up and being heard in a room full of people who are passionate about technology.

I read an article where former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor described how she changed her speech pattern to ensure that she kept her colleagues' attention and accentuated her points.

So sometimes during an active meeting I may change the way I deliver an opinion. For example, I might speak more slowly or intentionally. I think about the one or two points that are most important to get across and only speak to those.

I've always wanted to work with customers and talented people on interesting projects while learning the latest technologies. At the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, I'm in an environment that encourages growth, innovation and initiative. My management team is more than willing to find challenging opportunities for exploring next-generation tools and advanced tech solutions.

The Federal Reserve System also has a "leadership exchange" program in which teams can post temporary positions, and staff across the System can apply to gain expertise in a different platform or group. I am currently participating in one of these opportunities for business architecture, and I've enjoyed gaining this exposure while connecting with a wider group of colleagues.

Connecting directly with other women in engineering is a great way to find out how a company supports active learning and development. Attending networking meetings or finding visible success stories on LinkedIn can help reveal how a company supports growth.

I would explore a company's website and look at their leadership team to see how women are represented. Take a deeper look: See if the company goes beyond a well-crafted mission statement and has actual partnerships with organizations that nurture women's leadership.

FedNow is a transformational product, bringing instant payments to the nation. Not only have we built an outstanding product, we've built an outstanding team - profoundly talented people, and a strong, inclusive culture. I'd stack our team against any product engineering team in the world.