In our CWiT Talent series you can meet professionals from across the industry working in various roles. Learn about their experiences and get inspired for your own tech journey!
Name: Chantel Olieman
Company: Microsoft
Position: Software Engineer
Tell me about you and your role?
I work as a software engineer at Microsoft. Our product “Azure cache for Redis” provides a scalable distributed cache on Azure. As a Software Engineer (SWE) I work on maintaining and expanding this service, as well as helping customers achieve more!
Tell me about your career path so far?
I studied Computer Science at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. During the final year of my Masters, I did an internship with Microsoft in Oslo. What I liked most about this internship was the culture at Microsoft which eventually made me decide to join the company full-time in Dublin. When I moved here, I was not able to join the team I initially interviewed with, which was scary and stressful. But it turned out great! The team I ended up in worked on scaling machine learning models to different spoken languages e.g. Applying ML on English, as well as Spanish or Chinese data at the same time. After two years I felt like it was time for a new challenge, so I decided to join my current team. I am learning a lot here and I feel like I can really make a difference every day!
What do you like about working in tech?
A lot of the problems we are trying to solve are very technical and feel like puzzles. You will not always find a matching piece, but when you do, there is no better feeling 😊. And what’s more: The solutions to these puzzles will impact people’s life for the better!
Share 1 insight for someone looking to enter the tech industry?
There are lots of things I do not know. I feel like there is a huge misconception that you need to know everything about computers/tech to land a job in tech. While you definitely need a solid foundation, it is okay to not know everything. A big part of our job is familiarizing ourselves with new types of technologies every day.
