Senior Success: Charles Auriemma Is a Senior Audit Analyst at American Express
For the latter half of 2019, Charles Auriemma was working double-time — spending 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. as an audit analyst for Fidelity Investments in Jersey City, and evenings completing his degree in financial technology at NJIT's Martin Tuchman School of Management (MTSM), through a full and final semester of both online and on-campus classes. He didn’t get many zzzs.
“Yes, [I was] very tired,” he said with a laugh. But, “I got lots of sleep in January.”
Fidelity was one of three job offers Auriemma received many months before he graduated early in December 2019. The others were audit positions from Guggenheim Partners, where he interned, and Interactive Brokers.
Just this past January, he received a fourth, from American Express. Auriemma was on a well-earned vacation in Cancun when a rep from the global company’s human resources department found him through LinkedIn and reached out. A phone interview and an in-person meeting one week later were followed immediately by an offer to be a senior audit analyst, two rungs up from his position at Fidelity and with a 20% higher base salary. He accepted it.
“Fidelity, I was happy there but I felt I wasn’t using my skills to the best of my ability,” said Auriemma, who started at American Express in its Manhattan office just as the coronavirus pandemic was severely gripping the country. He went in to retrieve his laptop and returned home to work remotely.
Auriemma is on the professional practices team in the internal audit group. “We support the audit function as a whole. So I personally manage the governance risk and controls platform, which is what they use to input all of our audits so we can have historical data,” he explained. He also serves as a liaison between the data analytics and business people to facilitate continuous monitoring of controls within the business units.
The Hopatcong native was a natural at math in high school. He scored a 5 on the calculus advanced-placement test without even taking the course, absorbing what he learned in regular calc and teaching himself the additional material. Seeing the success a family friend had achieved after attending NJIT prompted him to apply to the university. He resided on campus his first two years and then moved off to live with and help care for his father, a painting, renovation and construction professional who is now cancer-free. (His mother is a property tax assessor for his hometown.)
Once at NJIT, Auriemma was actively involved in various student clubs: the Sigma Pi fraternity as recruitment chair and pledge class president; the Student Senate as webmaster; the Veteran Students Organization as representative for the Student Senate; and the NJIT chapter of Women in Computing Science as male representative, a position he chose to run for, he said, for its support of “a minority group within computer science.”
“Having a little sister, it does mean a lot to me, and being raised by a single mother also,” he remarked of the role.
He also played an integral part in an MTSM faculty-student research project, building a dashboard for an investment firm that enabled quick visualization and monitoring of real-time options data. Additionally, as a result of his own outreach and networking, he landed four paid internships during his years at NJIT, beginning the summer after his freshman year.
Auriemma is well prepared for his career in financial technology, having become certified in Bloomberg Market Concepts through MTSM’s Ray Cassetta Financial Analysis Laboratory, and versed in a bunch of programming languages including Python and SQL — which he noted are a “standout to employers.” He looks to climb the corporate ladder “as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then hopefully get into a C-suite role,” and credits NJIT to a great degree for his professional success to date.
As for moving on from the university, he will miss many things, the Sigma Pi fraternity most of all. “It’s a close-knit brotherhood. They followed me throughout my college career. I joined my freshman year, so it’s been [with me] through all of [my] battles and accomplishments.”
