As a Principal Engineer in the Software Engineering department, I’m across many different projects related to the Sirius application. Sirius is the software advisors in the Contact Centre and Retail stores use to manage customer accounts.

I work closely with the other front-end focused Principal Engineers in the department, to provide support for all our development teams. We get involved in upcoming projects early to help figure out how big they are, break them down and determine the best approach to achieving them.

We also support the front-end Platform Team who handle the more complex and fundamental changes to the application. We aim to make it as simple as possible for other teams to work on the codebase.

Since I support the development of Sirius, my primary customers are my Sky colleagues who use Sirius in their role. I am passionate about making Sirius fully accessible to every user.

I’m proud to have taken ownership of a department objective this year to build in Accessibility from the start into every piece of work we do; including setting up a working group of interested colleagues to help make that happen.

As part of our visit to our Contact Centre for Neurodiversity Celebration Week, a group of advisors shared their feedback with us. I have been really amazed by, and grateful for, the level of engagement so far, and I look forward to sharing our progress with them, and to further improve the experience of everyone who uses Sirius!

One thing I hear a lot of people say about Sky is that you’ll never be bored! This is so true.

I have worked at Sky for over 10 years now, and have had the opportunity to work on many big projects in that time. For example; building a refreshed Mobile sales site, and a brand new site to allow businesses to buy Broadband from Sky. The next big thing is always just around the corner.

The biggest challenge in terms of scale of the work, and the deadline to meet, was the delivery of Sky Glass. This wasn’t a case of just adding a new product; we decided we needed to build a whole new platform, front and back end, to support this new account type and to provide extensibility for the future.

About 5 years ago I found out that I’m Autistic. At the time I shared the news with just a few of my closest family and friends, as it felt like a deeply personal thing to share. I was worried that it might damage people’s perceptions of me.

Recently though, my team were all encouraged to take part in a very insightful and thought-provoking Diversity and Inclusion workshop run by Sky colleagues. Shortly after that we had various events available to take part in for Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

These events helped me understand the value of being more open and gave me the confidence to share my story with a wider audience in Sky. It was an incredibly positive experience with lots of kind and encouraging feedback that I am hugely grateful for!