My journey with Kainos so far

Trainee Data Engineer Ethan brings us on his journey from his school days in Adelaide to Kainos in Belfast, and shares his experience of the Data Academy programme.

Tell us about your journey through school to where you are now

I grew up in Adelaide South Australia and did most of my primary school and all of my high school years there.

I was initially interested in Chemical Engineering, which I studied briefly at Adelaide University. During this time at Adelaide University I took part in a technology entrepreneurship challenge and came up with an idea that came 2nd to a team of software engineers who prototyped a solution. I lacked these technical skills and this made me reconsider my pathway and switch to Software Engineering in order to develop them.  

I then moved back to Belfast and did a foundation degree in Software Engineering before continuing on a degree in Software Engineering at Queen’s University. I also was a finalist in my second year of university in an Ireland-wide business competition, where I was fortunate enough to learn more about entrepreneurship and engage with customers and their problems through customer interviews. It built my confidence in terms of pitching and articulating my ideas as I got to present to venture capitalists and get their feedback on those ideas. 

Did you always have an interest in working in IT/digital? 

Initially I didn’t.

I wanted to go into Chemical Engineering, as Chemistry is a subject that I am passionate about. However having switched to Software Engineering, I really enjoy the constant growth and innovation in this field. It’s incredible to see the difference IT can make in improving society and people’s lives.  

Is it living up to or exceeding your expectations? 

Working within the software industry has definitely exceeded my expectations. I enjoy working with intelligent and motivated people and using technology for good to add value to people’s lives. The challenges are exciting to solve and it’s a field where you can measurably see your growth as a task that may have taken a week soon takes a few days; or a verbose piece of code that you wrote when you were just starting, when you look at it again you can refactor it to be more elegant. 

Why did you choose to come to Kainos? 

I chose Kainos because I was looking at doing a Masters in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I am fascinated by AI as its applications and ability to improve society at scale are unmatched by nearly any other technology, with the exception of the new technologies emerging in the bioscience field i.e the mRNA vaccines and other new innovative treatments. 
 
Kainos held a Data Academy that let me learn a new skillset that built on top of my degree. I also had heard great things about the company in terms of the culture or learning and how everyone is very supportive and there are great opportunities to develop both professionally and personally. Additionally Kainos' lattice structure means that if I choose to I can switch into a Data Science role later on or other roles. 

What skills do you think you bring to your role and what are you learning? 

I think I am a good developer and communicator and I learn things relatively quickly; I love to find solutions to problems and I have strong lateral thinking skills. 

In terms of what I am learning since joining Kainos. I have learnt so much over the course of the Data Academy. I had no experience with big data at university, and in the Machine Learning modules I took the data was already preprocessed and cleaned. However, having finished the Data Academy, I have learned how to build an end to end big data system where we ingest data from an API source for both batch and streaming, put it through EventsHub Azures’s hyper scale events platform, then utilise Databricks to clean and process this raw data to a bronze stage, silver stage, and finally gold stage before enriching it with additional data through joins.

I also learned how to use PowerBI as a way to visualise and present the data. The use case that I worked on was the visualisations of live airport schedules and departures from the largest 138 international airports. I am excited to get onto a customer facing project and learn more!

What has been your favourite project so far and why? 

So far I have only had been involved in the Data Academy project. I really enjoyed it as it allowed us to learn through experimentation, and try new approaches to solving problems. We were also given the scope to come up with our own use cases and identify datasources that could help us realise them. It was a challenging but rewarding project as we worked as a team and conducted daily scrum meetings, sprint retrospectives whilst also maintaining version control and following peer code reviews. Prior to this, we had 2 weeks of lectures that brought us up to speed with fundamentals of big data and data engineering. 

How do you see your career unfolding at Kainos? 

So far I am really enjoying my role and see myself in it for the foreseeable future. However, as mentioned previously, I am very interested in deep learning, neural networks, and machine learning. Data Engineering is a vital and complimentary skillset to have for data science.

I am also interested in the less technical aspects such as the underlying pain point that a  customer is facing and thinking around the business case and how we can add the most value to them through a solution. My ideal future role would be a position where I could the business cases initially and then Machine learning or Artificial intelligence solution. 

What’s your favourite thing about working with Kainos? 

I love that everyone is very friendly, welcoming, and cooperative. Additionally, ideas that you suggest to improve processes or solve problems faced by the business are taken seriously and you feel heard regardless of your position within the company. As many other companies have rigid hierarchies with little to no communication between the various levels in their roles.