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 ton 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. You can read more about this on our website.

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 bits of machine learning and data modelling that we do.

I currently focus on interface design and data visualisation, but I’ve work on in a wide range of areas, from building and maintaining our servers using Chef, managing database clusters and 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’ve got to use my visualisation and mathematics / statistics experience to design and implement our data-visualisation dashboards, and to work on some statistical proofs and machine learning problems.