Kat Samperi

Staff Software Engineer @ICEYE

GB

Staff engineers can be a bit of everything. It’s a role I really love as you get to do something new every few days. I have been involved in both large scale architectural thinking, ways of working for software engineering, as tech lead in projects and as someone who can switch between (programming) languages quickly enough to help rewrite some of our researchers code into production ready products.I started out working with the infrastructure platform team, looking at what we could do to make some of the deployment process easier. We implemented atlantis to help with terraform deployments, and monitoring for some of our existing systems to try and improve developer experience and reliability.I then jumped into helping more on the product engineering side. The two projects I have been heavily involved in were first the flood rapid impact and now the hurricane rapid impact projects. Both of these started life as proof of concepts by the R&D team and then I have worked with them to help rewrite, re-engineer and turn them into products that we can put before our customers. This can involve rewriting code from R to Python before looking at optimisation & reliability. I have used Argo Workflows as a container orchestrator a lot in this.Currently we are setting up the Platform Engineering group and working on improving the developer experience for both software and machine learning engineers. This includes using golden paths, templates and an internal developer platform to improve discoverability and speed. We are also looking at how we can train and deploy machine learning models more effectively with sagemaker and other tools.Technologies/Languages used- Python, Go, R-lang, Bash- Git & GitHub Actions- Argo Workflows- Terraform & Atlantis - AWS (S3, EC2, RDS, Route53, Lambda, SageMaker & others)- Datadog (Inc. the service catalog)- Kubernetes, Karpenter and Istio- Flux & ArgoCD- QGIS, SarProz and finding my way through geospatial data- JIRA, Confluence

University of Birmingham

PhD

The University of Birmingham

MSc

The University of Birmingham

BSc