Women in Engineering Day: Catriona Smith
Q. Tell us a little about yourself and your background?
My name is Catriona Smith, I’m a Cloud Software Engineer who codes, plans, designs, creates, deploys and generally gets stuff done!
I have worked at geo for 3.5 years where I am Principal Software Engineer in the Cloud Team, but I have actually worked in engineering for over 19 years!
Q. What attracted you to a career in engineering and how did you get into it?
I actually got into engineering because a friend suggested I might like it (and she was right!) as she knew I liked to do a lot of problem solving, this was the main attraction for me.
Q. So what does your job involve?
Day to day my job involves working on the Cosy project which is our smart heating device, this includes:
- Designing components of our cloud platform
- Coding these components
- Adding enhancements to existing components and modules
- Enhancing our development environment
- Investigating why things are not working as we expected
- Working with our support team to resolve customer problems
- Being a scrum master
- This mainly involves planning our sprints with the Project Manager along with the rest of the team
Q. What advice would you give to women looking to start a career in engineering?
If you would like to get into engineering or are interested in finding out more, I would suggest shadowing someone for a day or 2 to see what’s really involved in becoming a software engineer.
If you’re keen on problem solving, or digging into what’s happening and why, you’ll make a great engineer!
It’s about making things better – making life smoother. Whether that’s things like Deliveroo, Smart Meters, or Self-Driving cars – all these things have the underlying thought, this part of life is fiddly, how can I design something new and better?
