New adventures

In the time before the iPhone and Instagram, before Uber and Netflix, I was a C++ developer working in the Finance industry (this was in 2007-2008, I am not that old… Oh, and I promise I didn’t have anything to do with the financial crisis). Although I was quite happy at my employer and really enjoyed what I was doing, an amazing opportunity came up for me. I had an interview with MathWorks, the creators of MATLAB!

After a thorough interview process, I joined MathWorks as a Training Engineer. And for three and a half years, I delivered training courses on MATLAB, Simulink, and Toolboxes to engineers and scientists in universities, research institutes, and companies across Spain and Portugal. This was especially exciting for me and truly learned a lot from the problems my students were trying to solve. But more importantly, I was enabling them to come up with solutions for such problems. Today, I still occasionally bump into some of them (the last one this week in the library) and I am glad that they remember those days fondly. And more importantly, that I could help them to get their job done.

I still remember how one day my manager mentioned to me how a new Application Engineer position was going to open up at the office, encouraging me to apply. And for the next 10 years, I switch gears to work directly with engineers and scientists across industries (aerospace, automotive, research, industrial automation, energy and utilities, oil and gas, robotics, etc.) to help them tackle their real-world problems in AI. And it was fascinating! Such problems varied from training Deep Neural Networks and using Computer Vision algorithms to support Automated Driving or Robotics workflows, developing an incremental learning algorithm for Health Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance applications in the cloud, to cleaning a messy dataset. As an Application Engineer, I was exposed to all kinds of problems. Frequently there were things I didn’t know about and had to learn. On other occasions, I had to team up with a specialist in that area. Looking back, I am amazed at how much I have learned over these years and feel extremely grateful for the opportunity I was given years back.

So, what next? After working as a customer-facing engineer at MathWorks for over 13.5 years, another exciting opportunity came up. Last December, I joined MathWorks’ Product Management team as a Product Manager for Deep Learning. My educational background, research interest, and professional position are now all coming together.