About Tom Meltzer

Career journey

Over the last 10 years I have had jobs in industry, academia and now I find myself somewhere in between. I had a brief stint in Finance working as part of a 2 year graduate scheme. I had just finished my MPhys at Sheffield University and I felt ready for a change of scenery. I spent the first year working on credit risk models and the second year in the front office working with the Bank's clients. I learned a lot from my time here, but mostly that it wasn't right for me. I enjoyed the technical aspects of my job but it was missing a deeper connection. I decided to return to academia and applied for a PhD at UCL.

It felt great to be back in academia and there was more than enough mental stimulation to keep me occupied for the next 4 years. During my PhD I thought about possible career trajectories. This was another lesson gained from working in industry, to focus on long-term objectives not just day-to-day, and I realised pursuing a permanent academic position also wasn't right for me, but I knew I wanted to be involved with research. I decided to apply for a post-doc at Charles University in Prague. I had always wanted to live and work in Europe and I wanted the chance to contribute back to science. I loved the post-doc and I was hoping I could just "post-doc" forever. But unfortunately, academia has a rather rigid structure and it just wasn't an option.

This is where I feel like I have cheated the system. A friend of mine forwarded me a job advert for a Research Software Engineer. It takes my favourite bit of my post-doc (writing scientific software for researchers) without the hassle of writing research grants, papers and applying for new positions every 12-24 months. Since then, I worked as an RSE in Leicester University before joining the ICCS at Cambridge earlier this year.

A typical day

The very first thing I do is zip through all my notifications. I mostly use Slack, Github and email. I have various meetings that are spread across the week, some days more than others. I'd say they take up about 20% of my time. Half of them are with external researchers and the other half are internal.

Outside of meetings I get to focus on my projects. I try and jump into the terminal as quick as possible, open up vim and get to work. Typically RSEs will have a 40/40/20 split. So I have two main projects which I dedicate about 40% of my time to, each. The remaining 20% is used to work on internal projects.

Proud moments

Software engineering, especially in the context of research, can vary a lot. Sometimes I might spend a lot of time thinking deeply about a problem before I actually do anything. Other times, I know exactly what I need to do. I'd say one of my favourite parts of the job is debugging. Once I get into gdb and start investigating a bug, it's like a puzzle or a good murder mystery. The time it takes to find the bug can vary massively (memory/parallel errors can be the hardest to track down) but the longer it takes the better it feels when you finally catch it!

The best thing about working at ICCS is that you get to work with extremely talented and knowledgeable people. I look forward to learning new ideas from my colleagues and sharing my own skills not just because I really enjoy it, but because as a team we can develop bigger and better climate models to improve our understanding of the planet.

My hobbies

I play the guitar and sing, mostly at open-mic nights. My favourite genres are country, folk and blues.