These days I belong to the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, headed by Tony Ruto. (Tony joined Autodesk with the acquisition of Within Technologies, back at the end of 2014, where he was CTO.)
Tony’s team is a shared resource for the various “Core Science” and “Industry Futures” teams within Autodesk Research: we help develop prototypes and platform capabilities that are used elsewhere in the organisation, and also have members of our team embedded within these other teams.
The team is growing, which is quite exciting: there are a number of open positions that I’d encourage you to share or apply for:
Sr. Software Engineer (London, UK)
Principal Software Engineer (London, UK)
Software Engineer, Robotics Simulation (San Francisco, USA)
Software Engineer, Robotics and Machine Learning (San Francisco, USA)
Senior User Experience Designer (San Francisco, USA)
The big news is that the first two positions in this list are in my immediate team. Yes, I’m going back to the Dark Side, having been asked to head up the “Convergence Engineering” team within Tony’s org: with the increase in his team size, Tony had to put a new management structure in place. As I’d already managed teams at Autodesk, I was asked to squirt a bit of WD-40 on my rusty management skills and roll up my sleeves. :-)
Those of you who have listened to recent podcasts I’ve participated in (whether with Getting Simple or Archgyan) will note that just a few months (actually, weeks) ago I had no expectation of taking on any management responsibility. It’s still not an aspiration for me to have a team once again, if I’m honest – if I’m taking this on it’s to help the team I’m in – but I do think it’ll be fun: I’m managing a couple of very smart people in their first management roles – the hires I’ve mentioned will be reporting to one of them, while the other already has a full team – so I see my main role as mentoring future leaders (and perhaps even my own future boss). And I don’t expect the additional adminisitrivia load won’t stop me from staying hands-on with our technology and writing this blog, for instance.
These two London-based positions will be embedded in our Manufacturing Industry Futures team, and focus on the creation of Digital Twins for that space (think Dasher but for Industry 4.0 or factory-of-the-future scenarios). They may well involve leveraging Dasher, but that’s an open question.
This is a great opportunity for people who want to be involved in building cutting edge technology that may one day change the world. The emphasis in this sentence is intentional: research is about exploration, not bringing products to market. There is more freedom in this kind of development role, but also a strong likelihood that you’ll be changing direction more often than as part of a product team. It’s not for everyone!
While on the subject of Digital Twins – and product teams – if you’re more interested in joining a new product team in a Product Manager role, don’t forget this opportunity I posted about recently.
Photo credit: amtec_photos Scrabble - Now Hiring via photopin (license)
