I work within Video Player Technology where we work across OTT propositions; NOW, Peacock, SkyShowtime, and more. Ensuring our propositions are delivering great content to our customers.

I am responsible for teams from both Sky and NBCU, based in London as well as across the US, focussing on playback.

There was an interesting project I participated in during a previous role, working more on Sky's metadata systems. We were tasked with ingesting data from Rotten Tomatoes and Common Sense Media organisations, to identify movie ratings and detailed parental guidance information. This supports parents in making informed decisions with respect the content their children watch.

It was interesting to better understand some of the challenges that parents might face in world of on-demand content. It's rewarding to see the metadata from both services begin show up on the set top box and influence our customers' viewing decisions.

At Sky, we're all users of the great products that were helping to build. It's always very exciting to hear about a new vision or feature that we need to build and support. And to consider how that might influence our own experience at home.

It's nice to be able to point to new features. Showing friends and relatives the cool stuff we're involved with every single day!

I joined Sky via the Software Engineering Academy graduate programme. From my first weeks and months, I was immediately taken aback by how much I was listened to, despite relatively little professional software development experience.

Everyone was eager to hear me out. Colleagues offered their advice and guidance to support my ongoing learning and growth.

All teams I've had the pleasure of joining have been incredibly inclusive, prioritising the collaborative journey over individual contributions.

We challenge each other and push one another to achieve more. Competing ideas often need evaluation before a solution is identified, but this happens in an environment where the whole team acknowledges everyones' contributions - and iterates towards building an even better product or solution.

Throughout my experience within the Software Engineering Academy, the support offered was superb. The bootcamp training was fast-paced and covered a huge amount of information, but it was the educational project that was the most valuable to me.

The project saw us self-organising and driving our own requirements, as well as technical direction and solution design. It was this experience of the full project life-cycle that equipped me with great confidence about the next steps.

Following this, I joined my first real delivery team. Everyone was incredibly helpful in getting me up to speed and learning more about our project and technology. This was helped somewhat by the great reputation that graduates from previous years had established,

At no point did I feel like my voice was heard to any less than much more experienced colleagues. This is testament to the Software Engineering Academy, and the wider Sky community.