 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined today by Amelia Sherifova. She is the VP of Architecture and Engineering at Northwestern Mutual. Thanks so much for joining us, Amelia. Thank you for having me. So, I want to start out by talking about how you got to Northwestern Mutual. You came via an acquisition. You were CTO of LearnVest. Yes. What is LearnVest? LearnVest is a financial planning startup. It's a company that's bringing financial planning to the masses. It's a very mission-driven organization. And when Northwestern Mutual came with an interest to acquire us, we saw an incredible opportunity to partner with a Fortune 100 company and tap into its client base of five million people and bring sort of best-in-class digital experience and innovation with best-in-class financial services products. So, talk about that problem a little bit in terms of bringing financial planning to the masses. Why don't the masses have financial planning? I mean, what's the disconnect? I think it's not easy. Often it's a human-driven problem. And often humans do not want to deal with their finances. I know personally for myself, historically, when I met with my financial advisor in the past, I will get a plan and I wouldn't follow up on that, right? So, building delightful experiences that engage our clients, right? With the combination of financial planner that's prodding you and giving you guidance. So, there is a human there. It's not just, okay. There's no way to avoid a human. So, it was the original model of LearnVest to have a human help the robot part of it. And we are doing the same thing with Northwestern Mutual where we're leveraging Northwestern Mutual best-in-class distribution workforce and providing them tools to help them do their work best. I love the idea of a delightful experience when dealing with your finances. It seems antithetical. Give me some examples of what you mean by this. I think, you know, ability to give you a 360 view of your life and give you a financial wellness score, for instance, after we've gotten a couple of data points about you, but also gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you and give you a score, one score that gives you an idea what's the probability of you reaching your financial goal or you retiring or you going broke. So, there's a way to do that in an easy digestible and kind of delightful way where we're able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for kind of financial security of our clients. And R, what is the customer response here? Customer response? Yeah. Oh, it's been great. You know, now that we've rolled out a lot of these experiences for the customer base of Northwestern Mutual, we have massive engagement with our customers. Our traffic has gone dramatically up. So, people are hungering for this. Absolutely. It's a much needed thing and we're here to help them. So, you've now been with Northwestern Mutual for a few years now. Dividing your time between New York and Milwaukee. You're in both technology and financial services, both male dominated fields. Can you describe a little bit about your career path and how you got into it and what you've learned along the way? Absolutely. I'm originally from Russia and I come from a family of engineers, so it's a somewhat natural path for me. And I got into software engineering in the late 90s. My go-to language initially was C programming and I participated in the Y2K challenge on Wall Street. Which seems so quaint. And I've spent over a decade on Wall Street building electronic trading systems, market data feeds. So, yes, I feel honored to have been able to pursue and have these possibilities. But I know how not easy it is given what a male dominated world this is. Is it as bad as the headlines make it out to be? I mean, it really does, when you read it, it's sickening that the sexism, the biases, what's your experience been? I think, I've been lucky enough to work in very supportive places. But I can tell you, majority of many teams that I've been part of are majority male. And whether my teammates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn't look like you, act like you, lean on sort of similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment, right? And so, I recognize that. And a big part of that I feel is having proper onboarding practices, you know, because onboarding often can happen if you don't have a formal onboarding practice, onboarding can happen in informal ways. And when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you and you hang out with, if you look at the technology world, it's dominated by mostly male. If you are in a startup world, it's mostly young males. And so, I am determined to bring operational excellence and sustainability and diversity through strong operational practices, like ensuring that there's proper onboarding, where, for instance, a young mother who has a child and has to potentially go to home at 4 p.m. and cannot hang out with the guys and drink Coke or beer at 7 p.m. to really understand the culture of the group that she joined. We want to make sure that she has sustainable, thoughtful onboarding practices, feeling like she's part of the organization. This is just one way of doing it. And are you pairing, in terms of the onboarding, and I think you're absolutely right in the sense that we do gravitate to people who are just like us, look like us, talk like us, think like us. So are you pairing them with, pairing the new people with people who are not like them in the sense to sort of get different from something? Absolutely, but also we're actually pairing them with people who also recently just went through onboarding, they're just joined also fairly recently. That way they can explain the pitfalls that they have gone through. And so we're definitely making sure we have these kind of co-pilots, but also rigorous processes to get people comfortable. Whatever their background is. Now, how many Grace Hoppers have you been to, Amelia? I have to say, this is my first one. Your first one, you're a newbie. Yes. So what has your experience been so far? I am incredibly, I'm incredibly moved by the experience actually. I have to say, I've never seen so much energy before. I am moved by the stories that I've heard incredibly inspired. I am inspired to keep pushing. I felt I could relate to a lot of presenters' backgrounds. I also came from a small town that actually is not on the map because it was a military town in the former Soviet Union. And a lot of stories of overcoming and persisting and ending up here is what I can relate to. So I'm very excited, very grateful. And I want to be here every year. So you'll be back. Totally. Great. Well, Amelia, thanks so much for joining us. It's been really fun talking to you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We will be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.