Behind Hedgehog is a series of interviews designed to shine the spotlight on the fantastic team of individual experts who are responsible for bringing the Hedgehog vision to life. 

We’d like to introduce Django Shelton who is Lead Engineer at Hedgehog. Django is responsible for all things engineering and technology

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Share a little about your previous experience

Most recently I worked at Bulb, where I led the on-call programme for all of engineering and was responsible for the uptime and reliability of Bulb as a Site Reliability Engineer. I also launched their Electric Vehicle charging app, and spent time in the Revenue and Priority Care teams.

Before that, I worked at IBM for a number of different clients, covering Government, Banking, and Consulting. We helped clients launch new products, implement new technology, and transform their culture.

I’ve worked on every part of the tech stack, but I have a passion and focus on backend, cloud / infrastructure, and DevOps / SRE.

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Why did you join Hedgehog? 

I obviously thought the idea was solid, and I could see myself investing in it so it made sense to join! The founding team and product team also really impressed me, and I could see that the main thing missing was someone to execute their vision, which I knew I could bring to the table. Finally, the practical application of blockchain technology was really exciting, and I’m intrigued to see how far we can push this tech in a meaningful way.

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What do you enjoy most about your role here? 

The freedom and autonomy to make decisions and shape our product. I love being given vague problems to solve and coming up with solutions to those problems, rather than just delivering an exact design or specification.

I’m also really enjoying helping our other engineers grow and become more and more awesome every day. 

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What excites you most about Hedgehog’s mission? 

I love the potential Hedgehog has to allow more people to align their investments with their personal values. Particularly in the sustainability and positive social benefit areas. On top of that, I think that Hedgehog’s vision of a world where more people have better opportunities to invest in the world around them will be revolutionary to the industry.

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Quick-fire favourites:

Favourite emoji 🤔

🤙

Favourite food 🍽️

Chicken wings

Favourite hobby outside of work 🏌

Football (watching, coaching, playing, the list goes on…) or any water sports.

Favourite way to spend your holidays ⛱️

Exploring somewhere new and eating anything delicious that I can get my hands on.

Favourite piece of career advice💡

Ask for forgiveness, not permission! It’s much easier to just get stuff done than it is to try and get someone to say yes to an idea.

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