A day in the life of a Senior Software Engineer

Date posted
30 June 2016
Reading time
6 Minutes
Siona Murray

A day in the life of a Senior Software Engineer

In the next in our series of careers blogs, Kainos' Siona Murray invites you to take a look into the journey she took from Placement Student all the way to Senior Software Engineer. Where my journey began... I joined Kainos back in August 2011 as a Placement Software Engineer. I'd heard about the company from one of my programming demonstrators who also worked here. I wanted to work somewhere with a diverse client base, room for great career progression and a talented bunch of people. When Adam told me Kainos ticked all the above and had a vibrant social scene too, the deal was sealed! I worked for Kainos on a part time basis for the remaining two years of my Master's degree, returning as a full time SE in June 2014. I've since been promoted and currently hold the position of Senior Software Engineer. A typical day? A day in the life of a Senior Software Engineer at Kainos is varied and this is one of the reasons why I love it! I could be writing and testing a piece of Spark code, working on one of our in-house innovation projects or travelling to a customer site to run requirements workshops, ensuring that our client gets the high quality software service they wanted. As part of my role I've also had the opportunity through Kainos MAP to be trained and certified as a Scrum Master. As a result, I've taken the lead on running the associated ceremonies, mandated by the Scrum agile framework, for some of our public sector clients. Kainos has also given me some pretty awesome travel opportunities, including training in New York and working with customers in Dublin and London. Next generation technology During my time at Kainos I have been an integral part of development teams delivering high quality software to both public sector and private clients. I've been exposed to a multitude of technologies. From the next generation tech and tooling required for our data analytics projects, to the Microsoft tech stack and also some legacy solutions required for a telecommunications customer. I've also delivered software under both the waterfall and agile methodologies. This said, agile is my preferred method, and I've seen it become the most commonplace on Kainos projects. Life changing projects One of my highlights of my Kainos career has been a project which was developed for a UK county council. The solution is designed to support the planning and evacuation of vulnerable people in the event of an emergency situation. Our team engaged with the council to bring together different data sources from multiple agencies in reduced time frames, enabling a faster and more accurate incident response from both emergency planners and respondents on the ground, in situations where 'slow' can cost lives. On this particular project, our team built an innovative, secure centralised vulnerable citizen hub and mobile geo-spatial dashboard solution deployed into an IL2 accredited UK-hosted cloud platform. I was part of the development team in the alpha and beta phases and the project is now production-ready. It was selected as Computer Weekly's Editor's Choice in the Digital Leaders 100 awards. For me, this project is what it is all about. To use technology and engineering to have a positive impact on the real lives of others is really as good as it gets! Interested in working with us on life changing projects? View our Software Engineer Roles and Senior Software Engineer roles here! Kainos-Recruitment-Email-Signature

About the author

Siona Murray