From music streaming, to machine learning: Meet Michael

For our next instalment of Meet the Team, we chatted to our brand new Data Engineer, Michael.

Tell us a bit about yourself…

Well, I’ll start by saying I’m Data Engineer born and raised in London.

I’m really fortunate to have been able to work in some really interesting sectors: music streaming, finance, and more recently, in travel and tourism. This means the projects I’ve worked on are really varied, from building APIs, to full text web search relevancy - how well search results match a user's intent - and writing software for large scale data pipelines from scratch.

What has brought you to Climate Policy Radar?

It’s impossible to ignore the effect of the climate breakdown. Notably the heatwaves. Every year they are longer, hotter, and more frequent. Having a transferable skillset like data engineering, at some point I knew I had to take the plunge and realign my experience with my values. 

The problem that CPR’s is working to solve is both fascinating and urgent in equal measure. 

Beyond the mission though, the practical application of engineering I’ve already been doing in other sectors for climate action is in some ways even more compelling. I’ve already worked on big data, but finding ways to store and organise that data to solve the climate emergency? Incredibly exciting and valuable.

What does a day in the life of a data engineer look like?

Perhaps I’ll let you know when I’m further into the job, but for now, I’m expecting to help build a platform that’s not only accurate and enriched with the best data, but that it’s easily discoverable through improving its search relevancy. Also I’m looking forward to implementing Machine Learning for that end.

What can you usually be found doing Friday?

Friday you can find me spending time with family, or out at a live music concert. If the sun is shining, I might be out for a run or a bike ride.