With a constantly evolving product within the health industry, there are always new and exciting problems to solve and never a chance to get bored. I have been involved with making both product and technical decisions, and there has been an openness to working with new patterns and technologies in order to achieve the best results.

Working at msk.ai has been hugely challenging and equally rewarding. It has been over 4 years and I have not felt as if my role has stagnated. Over that time, as the company has grown, my role has expanded from full stack engineer to encompass greater responsibilities, both technical and managerial with me now leading a growing backend team.

Msk.ai is still a relatively small team, and credit is always given where it is due with a great feeling of cameraderie. Work by individuals or teams is actively recognised even if it isn't obviously visible. A culture of ownership is central, and each employee is able to feel personal pride in their achievements.

When I first joined the company, it was in a content role. I was technically minded but lacking concrete skills. The nature of the content system meant that I was slowly exposed to things like Python, Git, and started to learn about databases and how our content was stored. The company then gave me an opportunity to become a Data Analyst. Learning SQL allowed me to write reports to extract data from our data warehouse. It also gave me the tools to inspect and judge the quality of historical data as well as data currently being created on the platform. From there, I could then make fixes to that historical data where appropriate, or flag areas for development. From there, I was able to take more and more responsibility over the development and maintenance of the data warehouse, as well as formulating an analytical layer to serve internal and external reporting. I was also responsible for creating dashboards on an internal Superset reporting server, to help internal stakeholders visualise key metrics. I also then was able to take control over the development and maintenance of the Airflow ETL pipeline operating between our backend databases and the data warehouse. In this role I was able to start to write more Python code, and to learn about containerisation, CI/CD, testing, documentation, cloud computing, networking and many other key areas.

Since the pandemic, the company has embraced the modern standard of flexible working and there is zero pressure from any level to commute in. They are also very understanding over illness, personal circumstance, personal appointments etc.

Working for msk.ai means working for a company that will have material improvement on everyone involved in a surgical procedure. The scope for impact, both on patient health, and on the feedback loops within the healthcare industry, means that you are playing a role at the cutting edge of digital health.