# Elias Bennett

I’m Elias, a software engineer in London. I build pricing and risk engines at BNP Paribas in C# and Java, and products of my own.

> I build pricing and risk engines at BNP Paribas, and products of my own.

I’m the team’s only C# engineer, and the engines run on CPU and GPU. I’ve won the bank’s digitisation competition and a Take Ownership award.

## Work

History, then marketing, then code. Each move was towards the work I liked most.

- [BNP Paribas](https://www.eliasb.dev/work/bnp-paribas): Software engineer, Jul 2025 – now.
  - Winner: Digitisation · 2025
  - Take Ownership: Q1 2026
  - AI Champion: 2026
- [Joveen](https://www.eliasb.dev/work/joveen): Full stack software engineer, Aug 2024 – Jun 2025.
  - Page load, cut by 40%: Cut page load by 40% by refactoring React components and lazy-loading assets.
  - Key API p95, 520 ms → 230 ms: Added indexes and rewrote slow queries, starting with the API that mattered most.
  - Mobile retention, up 30%: Fixed mobile layout and browser bugs found by a cross-browser testing pipeline.
- [Optegra Eye Healthcare & Kensington Medical](https://www.eliasb.dev/work/optegra): Marketing executive, Sep 2021 – Aug 2024.
  - Core Web Vitals pass rate, 62% → 88%: Scoped performance fixes with the engineers and ticketed them.
  - p95 page load, cut by 30%: The same scoped, ticketed fixes.
  - Where the switch started: The best part of the job was working with the engineers who built our website.
- History at uni: Before 2021 · Because I loved it, and I still do. (Diploma of Higher Education, History, University of Essex, Jul 2021)

### Where I’m headed

Building a whole product well: what to make, why it works, and getting it to production. How far I’ve got on each.

- Judgement: Knowing what’s worth building. At Optegra, split tests and dashboards guided what the engineers built next.
- Depth: Knowing why it works, not just that it does. Six months from zero C# to production code, in a pricing engine of around 70 projects.
- Range: The whole way, from idea to running in production. Threshold, from 57 user stories to a live site.

## Things I make

Products of my own, from a rental calculator to a risk simulator.

- [Threshold](https://www.eliasb.dev/things-i-make/threshold) (2026): A clearer view of what moving could cost.
- [Argus Risk](https://www.eliasb.dev/things-i-make/argus-risk) (2026): Every number shows where it came from and how old it is.
- [Flowtime](https://www.eliasb.dev/things-i-make/flowtime) (2026): Breaks that match how long you actually focused.
- Home Secretary (2026): A household coordination prototype, built for my software engineering coursework.
- Risk Event Tracker (2025): A tested C# Web API for managing risk events.
- Ask Professor Past (2025): History you can talk to. Version 1; I’m rebuilding it.

The full list is at [Things I make](https://www.eliasb.dev/things-i-make).

## How I work

Four habits, and where I picked them up.

1. **Start from a real problem.** Threshold started because my friends had no clear idea what renting would cost by area. Flowtime started because Pomodoro kept cutting me off mid-flow.
2. **Write it down first.** Before I build, I write down the problem, who it’s for, and what’s out of scope. Threshold had 57 user stories before any code.
3. **Ship it so it’s safe to undo.** At BNP Paribas, taking a stale data dependency out of live pricing, I put the new path behind a feature flag that defaults to off, with caching and an end-to-end test nobody had asked for.
4. **Measure whether it works.** I learned this in marketing. At Optegra, split tests and analytics dashboards showed which changes brought in consultations and guided what the engineers built next; consultation conversion rose by 15%.

## Off the clock

What my own time looks like this week. My training week:

- Monday: Full-body gym
- Tuesday: Zone 2 run
- Wednesday: Full-body gym
- Thursday: Interval run
- Friday: Full-body gym
- Saturday: Zone 2, rower or bike
- Sunday: Assault bike intervals

The page also shows what I am reading, the last film I watched, an odd fact from this week in history, my GitHub year and what I am making now, live from Goodreads, Letterboxd, Wikipedia and GitHub.

## Say hello

- Email: eliasthebennett@gmail.com
- [Résumé](https://www.eliasb.dev/resume)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/3ixas)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/elias-t-bennett/)