Can you walk us through your career journey and what led you to SciLeads?
I did a computing degree at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then I started as a .NET backend engineer for a payments company in a graduate role for a couple of years. After that, I wanted a bit more ownership in the startup field, and that’s when I saw SciLeads was hiring, with skills that overlapped. The .NET side of things was a good match.
There were some things I was missing, but I trusted that I could learn them by getting thrown into the deep end and working with new tech. I wanted ownership and the opportunity to do projects myself, end-to-end, design, implementation, deployment, etc.
I worked at SciLeads for about a year and a half, and then decided to go off travelling with my girlfriend for a year. Luckily, I got a developer job while I was over there, so I was still doing .NET and wasn’t just taking a year out holidaying. Whilst it was nice to get away for a year, I had been a little reluctant to leave in the first place, so it was good to come back after a year and get straight back into it.
What led you to return to SciLeads after travelling?
I think I was reluctant to leave in the first place. It was more of a travelling idea rather than wanting to leave SciLeads. When I was coming back, I felt like I had unfinished business and projects at SciLeads. The work I was doing when I was leaving was very interesting, so I knew that once I came back, I would be straight into the deep end of exciting projects and plenty of learning. About a year and a half after rejoining, this turned out to be true, with a lot of exciting projects coming my way. At times, there was almost too much to learn, which is a good problem to have.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on at SciLeads that you’ve been particularly proud of?
There have been loads, but one that stands out is one of the first projects I worked on end-to-end, incorporating exhibitor data into our platform. When companies go and exhibit at conferences and events, it’s useful for clients to see which conferences they’ve attended and exhibited at. So the project involved ingesting the new data, transforming it, and matching it to our existing organisations on the platform. It was about working across the full process, from ingestion to transformation, to putting it onto our full-text index, so that it’s searchable. There was a bit of complexity there, so it was a good first project for me.
How has your experience at SciLeads shaped your development as a Software Engineer?
Primarily, it involves data engineering skills. We are mainly a data company, so it’s about getting to grips with streaming these huge datasets every day, both new and existing ones. It’s about building my skills in scraping data sets and keeping them up to date, whether that’s through a front-end or an API that we’re using to ingest the data. Then, it’s about taking that data, transforming it, and building it into our matching algorithms before putting it onto our full-text index so it’s searchable from a customer perspective. So yes, there’s a lot of data processing involved, including doing that at scale and keeping everything up to date.
How has flexible working supported your role, and what do you value most about working at SciLeads?
Flexible working works for me. I find that I work and focus a lot better at home. As long as you get your setup right and have a good balance of taking your breaks and things, it works well. The good thing about here is that you’re left to go and do your work, but if you need to schedule meetings for unblockers and things like that, people will be there to help you and get you going with your projects. So you’re not just left on your own; if you need any help, it’s always there. For focus, it’s helped me the best. As long as everyone communicates within the team, it’s probably a lot more efficient, in my eyes.
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