AlphaPoint adds 50+ years of institutional experience to engineering team
We are excited to welcome two additions to our engineering team — Chris Ford and Ashton Thorogood — between them over five decades spent designing and developing complex data systems in financial services.
“Chris is the best systems programmer I’ve ever worked with and Ashton is the best data architect I’ve ever worked with,” said AlphaPoint’s current EVP of Technology Scott Scalf, who worked with both men previously at Susquehanna International Group.
“Both Ashton and Chris bring with them deep expertise and a track record of demonstrated success,” remarked Joe Ventura, AlphaPoint Founder & CEO. “This will prove invaluable — both as we extend the technical capabilities of our enterprise platforms, and as we broaden the scope of business solutions we’ve built on top of them.”
Chris Ford joins as Senior Engineer, having spent over 25 years architecting high-performance distributed systems in senior technical roles at Bloomberg, Merrill Lynch, SIG, and elsewhere.
In his role at Bloomberg, Chris architected web crawler services that combed over 2 billion URLs daily, creating the backbone for key Global Data and Bloomberg News offerings. At Merrill Lynch, Chris worked alongside Scott Scalf, where together they built Merrill’s distributed services framework, the basis for the firm’s entire suite of consumer-facing online products.
Ashton Thorogood brings to AlphaPoint a successful, 20+ year track record designing and implementing complex software systems.
Ashton spent 14 years at Susquehanna International Group, during which time, alongside Scott Scalf, he co-authored SIG’s Enterprise Domain Model, the foundation for new system development firm-wide. Ashton held various positions at SIG, including Enterprise Architect and Team Lead for Institutional Brokerage Middle/Back Office Systems. Most recently, Thorogood served as Head of Enterprise Architecture for The National Board of Medical Examiners. He joins AlphaPoint as Data Architect, focusing on information architecture, domain analysis, database engineering, and data modeling.
