I came to Ultima Genomics, a DNA sequencing startup, after I’d started a Life Sciences degree a year earlier. I found what I was looking for: a company where I could combine several of my areas of interest, and work with people from various disciplines.

Some of the things I built at Ultima include a tool for running ML experiments on cloud compute; a modular bioinformatics pipeline; and a Rust bridge between ML training tools so the ML engineers could keep using the training data they already had.

The really interesting challenge there was that the software engineers, ML and data scientists, and bioinformaticians were effectively speaking different languages. Being one of the few people deliberately focusing on both the engineering and the biology is what let me translate between them and do my part in helping the teams collaborate more closely together.