Finicity is part of the Mastercard family. Our open banking platform provides the financial data you need.

Open Banking

We are Mastercard: Rachel Burnett innovates and grows as a software engineer

Welcome to the first installment of We Are Mastercard, a series of blog posts highlighting the fintech innovators behind our platform. Mastercard’s open banking solutions are powered by thousands of connections to financial institutions, layers upon layers of security and groundbreaking artificial intelligence-driven analytics.

However, what truly sets our technology apart is the people who create it, like Rachel Burnett. She’s a software engineer at Finicity, a Mastercard company, and a 2020 graduate of the University of Utah.

What’s your position at Finicity? And what are your responsibilities?

I’m a software engineer on the Connect services team. We support Finicity Connect, an application that allows users to connect to their bank and pull their financial data.

My team manages a service that maintains and serves financial institution data. Everything from the physical location of the institution to the routing number, branding files and a lot more. We store that information and then serve that up to Connect.

One of the major challenges is how to make the users’ flow in Connect as efficient and successful as possible. Another challenge is market expansion, looking at how we’re moving our products and services into different countries.

How does Finicity give you the resources to solve those problems?

Teddy frequently reviews Rachel’s code while she’s working from home.

As an early career software engineer, I have a passion for technology and am always looking to learn and grow as much as possible by reading about new technologies or practicing coding languages I might not use regularly.

Every other Friday afternoon, we have “innovation time,” where we have the freedom to research or play around with side projects to grow and practice our skills as software engineers. It’s awesome that we can have that freedom and flexibility to work on those skills and learn more. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since I’ve been here.

What’s the culture like on your team?

I have really great teammates who have a lot more experience than me. They’re incredibly knowledgeable. And they’ve been incredibly patient and generous in sharing their expertise and helping me with problems along the way. They are such a valuable resource. Just being able to Slack them questions or ask them to pair-program with me has been incredibly helpful.

On our team, you’re not expected to have everything perfect the first time. Teammates offer to do code reviews, help you test across environments, and genuinely want you to succeed because that’s what will make the team succeed.

How does your team exemplify Mastercard values?

Ownership is really important and something that our team really values—making sure that our code is thoroughly tested and that we hold each other accountable with code reviews as a team, together. We make sure that we ask the right questions to verify that there aren’t any gaps and that we’ve thought about the different use cases and scenarios.

Even if something seems trivial, we take accountability so that we can see it all the way through to how it might affect the end user.

What does working at Finicity enable you to do in your spare time?

One of Rachel’s hobbies is hiking with Hazel on mountain trails just minutes away from Mastercard’s offices in Murray, Utah.

My dog loves hiking, so that’s always fun. Just spending time with friends and family, camping, that kind of stuff.

We have a good work-life balance for sure. If we ever need to take time off to recharge or go see family outside of Utah or anything like that, we’re definitely supported and encouraged to do so.

Why should someone consider joining the Mastercard open banking team?

I think it’s really exciting to be working in an industry that is so important. I mean, it’s awesome to see the impact of the work you do because banking has a place in all of our lives. That’s exciting.

Also, Mastercard has awesome values and we have great benefits. We have 5 paid volunteer days per year, “work from anywhere” days and the Mastercard Cares program. It’s a great company that really cares about the employee and the individual. You know, they want to see us succeed and be happy. And then, on top of that, I think it’s fun and engaging work.

Interested in joining our team?

We’re growing! Search for and apply to our open positions here. Also, stay informed about news, events, and opportunities at Mastercard by joining our talent community.