A year in industry

I started my placement at CME Group in July 2026 as a Systems Resilience Intern, working within Operational Resilience and IT Disaster Recovery.

University teaches you how systems work, mostly in theory, mostly in isolation. Placement has been my first proper look at what happens when those systems absolutely cannot be allowed to stop working, and what 'resilience' actually means once real consequences are attached to it.

I've been working on automation for resilience processes and taking part in disaster recovery exercises, including live failover testing that moves critical systems from on-prem infrastructure over to Google Cloud.

The interesting part to me isn't the cloud technology itself, it's the thinking underneath it. What happens if this goes down. How fast can it actually recover, not how fast the documentation says it should. What else depends on it that nobody's mapped out properly. Has anyone actually tested the recovery plan, or has everyone just assumed it works because it's written down somewhere.

I don't have some big reflective lesson to wrap this up with. Mostly I've just started looking at every system I build, including my own, and asking what happens the day it breaks.