Software Engineering

I'm a principal engineer at DataEQ (formerly BrandsEye), where I've worked since 2012. Being a principal engineer means that I spend a lot of my time focusing on product direction and design, as well as managing a team of engineers. I also write a lot of code.

DataEQ focuses on highlighting meaningful and actionable social media conversations for our clients, mostly around customer service and risk, usually within legal frameworks that different industries need to comply with, such as South Africa's treating customers fairly legislation.

A main tool of ours is our bespoke crowd-sourcing platform that we use to clean and label our data, creating accurate data sets for our clients, our analyst team, and the machine learning and data modelling that we do.

I currently focus on interface design and data visualisation, but I've worked in a wide range of areas, from building and maintaining our servers using Chef, managing database clusters, designing data schemas, and creating a range of micro-services using Spring Boot (including converting monolithic apps to use a service-oriented architecture). I also manage, coach and mentor other people on the dev team, and handle roadmaps and inter-departmental communication.

We have a lot of data to investigate, and I get to use my visualisation and mathematics / statistics experience to design and implement our data-visualisation dashboards, and to work on statistical proofs and machine learning problems.