Profile

I graduated from Loughborough University in 2010 with a degree in Systems Engineering. Since then I spent two years at BAE Systems working on unmanned aircraft before joining Jaguar Land Rover in November 2012.

I work to design features at what we call call the ‘System-level’ in the company. This basically means we take the customer requirements (e.g. ‘needs to go 0 – 60 in 5 seconds’ or ‘should have 3 different modes: Comfort, Sport and Insane’) and work out how to make the car achieve these things. This means I do a lot of thinking and innovating to ‘engineer’ new things – be it in software or a physical user interface.

Quite often I’ll sit down with a sheet of paper and think “How could this work then…?” and then consider all the ways it might go wrong and make sure it doesn’t! This is the really exciting thing about my work.

I lead a small team of engineers; so I hold the design responsibility for the vehicle I work on (unfortunately I can’t say which!). This means I tend to spend a lot of time reviewing other people’s designs and challenging them (asking really hard questions!) to make sure the designs are good.

I also design my own features. This involved working our how bits of software hosted in different areas of the car (i.e. in the battery or in the brakes system) work together to achieve the desired effect.

I do lots of design but once that’s done the fun really starts! Going in to this year we begin to test the designs in the car under many different operating conditions – hot / cold / fast / really fast / slow etc. I will spend a few months out in the car ‘signing off’ my features to make sure they’re ready to sell.

My vision is to start some after school clubs and summer camps focused on Engineering to inspire young people.

This would include:

2 hours per week for ~8 weeks
30 mins tutorial, 1.5h practical work in Electronics / software / 3D printing / programming / design.
A run through the full engineering lifecycle from understanding Customer needs to testing the end product.
Working together as a team to engineer a real product over the 8 weeks.
A lot of fun, hands on, eye-opening activities!

My wife is a primary school teacher and I’m a qualified engineer – so our ambition is to join forces and inspire the young engineers of the future!