“As a data scientist at Samotics, I develop and maintain machine learning algorithms to detect machine failures. Within the data science team, we also rotate what we call ‘helmet tasks’: the responsibility of keeping an eye on our real-time fault predictions and aligning with our customer success managers to take action.
“I was born and raised in Brazil and did my studies there. I majored in control and automation engineering, then did a master’s degree focused on data science. After my degree I worked for a company in Brazil, developing an IoT stack for monitoring the temperature in freezers. After four years I was ready for a new adventure, both professionally and in terms of life experience. I started looking for companies in Europe that were active in the IoT and data science sphere. Samotics’ focus on machine learning was the cherry on top for me. Applying cutting-edge AI to sensor data is exactly the niche I’m fascinated by.
“At Samotics, the work-life balance is good. It sounds mundane, but of course it’s very important! At Samotics, we work hard during the day and we demand quality from ourselves, but we are absolutely supported in having a healthy balance. There’s no culture of late-night or weekend emails or calls. We’re actively encouraged to take holidays. Working part time (four days instead of five) is completely accepted and quite common, at every level of the organization and in every team.
“Being from outside the Netherlands and even from outside Europe, I care about working at an inclusive organization. When I joined, the company was very small and most of my colleagues were Dutch. I sometimes had to remind colleagues to speak English, for instance during the office lunch. Now this has completely changed. The company has grown a lot over the past year and we have a pretty international team. English is now the standard. We actually recently hired two technical specialists from the other side of the world, simply because they were the best candidates out there.
“I’m excited that I get to continue developing my knowledge and skillset at Samotics. There’s a trend of moving AI to the edge, and I’m interested in developing and scaling this for our product. Traditionally, sensors send data to the cloud and we then use our database to develop algorithms and make predictions. In the cloud we have large computational resources available to make this happen. When you move this problem to the edge, there are more constraints. We don’t have a large database like that available, so we need to design up front how we’re going to choose and pre-process the data.”
