Ten Years In: Celebrating DRW as Code Platoon's Corporate Partner of the Decade

Ten years ago, DRW took a chance on a coding bootcamp with no track record.

In 2016, DRW was looking for a way to put its charitable dollars behind technology and underserved communities. Seth Thomson, who was at DRW at the time and helped launch the partnership, had struggled to find the right fit until Code Platoon crossed his desk. "We were really taking a flyer on the program," Seth remembers. "We were in it to support the mission, not necessarily to get a great employee out of it." DRW signed on as a sponsor of that very first cohort — now known as Alpha Platoon.

Over the last decade, DRW has invested over one million dollars into Code Platoon, hosted 31 apprentices, and extended 25 full-time offers. This September, as part of our 10-year anniversary, we're recognizing DRW as our Corporate Partner of the Decade — and no one tells that story better than two of DRW's own: Alex Arias and Stephanie Bounyavong.

Alex's story: from submarines to software

Alex spent three years in the Navy working on submarines and ships out of Guam before coming home to a tech landscape he was determined to break into. Code Platoon's in-person cohort and veteran community sealed the deal — he wanted to be around people who understood military life, and in the program's final weeks he had a TA, a mentor, and a resume coach preparing him for the job hunt.

That preparation led to an interview with DRW for an internship. He got it, converted it into a full-time job, and now works alongside other Code Platoon alumni inside DRW's walls. "It's so cool meeting other Code Platoon graduates at DRW," Alex said. DRW has been great and really prioritizes investing in organizations like Code Platoon, preparing people from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in finance and tech.

Stephanie's story: the first of her kind

Stephanie made history in her own right — the first military dependent to come through Code Platoon, after her cohort became the first to open enrollment beyond veterans themselves to their children. Her father served as a Marine for 20 years; she came to tech after a career in biology, looking for something more.

Code Platoon gave her the fundamentals. DRW gave her the runway to build on them. "During my internship at DRW, I had a very welcoming and patient team who taught me everything I needed to know about production-environment software engineering," Stephanie said. Three months later, that internship converted to a full-time Software Engineer role — and she was working with far larger datasets than she'd ever touched before.

A partnership that scaled with the mission

What makes DRW's decade stand out isn't just that the company said yes once. It's that DRW said yes for a decade. For Rod Levy, Code Platoon's Executive Director, that's the model working exactly as intended. "The goal of Code Platoon is to continue what we do well and try to do more of it," Rod said, "but we have to keep serving our stakeholders. That's our students, but also the companies who hire our students." Alex and Stephanie are proof of what that looks like when it works — two careers built, two families changed. As Code Platoon looks toward its next decade, deepening relationships like DRW's, alongside every partner who's stood with us, is exactly the plan.

Celebrate Code Platoon

We'll be recognizing DRW in person at Celebrate Code Platoon on September 23, as part of our 10-year anniversary festivities — with Alex and Stephanie among the alumni sharing their stories.

And if your company is reading this and wondering what a decade-long hiring partnership with Code Platoon could look like — this is it. Learn how to partner with Code Platoon and help write the next ten years of this story.