This week we’re shining the spotlight on Adebayo Adesanya, an Engineering Manager on our Search team. Adebayo, who has worked on multiple teams at BenchSci, helps break down what our Search team does to support our main users: scientists. We appreciate him taking the time to answer our questions about life in engineering at a remote-first company.
How did your engineering career lead you to the Search team?
I’ve had the opportunity to work with different technologies and solve different problems in the past. I’ve worked in fintech, govtech, ecommerce, and even fashion. For me, it’s always been about finding interesting problems where I can learn new technologies and work with them. That’s what brought me to BenchSci!
Fun fact: I’ve had the opportunity to work on multiple different teams within Engineering. I first joined the Client Integrations team, then moved to the Product-led Growth team, before an opportunity opened up on the Search team. Having worked on search applications in the past, it was definitely very intriguing to me. I liked seeing how search worked, tuning it, and trying to figure out how people would use it to locate information. So, here I am today.
What does the Search team do at BenchSci?
At the end of the day, what users want is to click buttons and type in a browser to find things. So what our team does, essentially, is take all of the data we have (experimental data, vendor data, and internal data) and put it in a format that makes it useable within a search context. We’re continuously refining the search capabilities on our applications, especially as we add more and more data, so that scientists can type in anything they are looking for and comb through results efficiently.
Why did you choose BenchSci?
The closest thing I knew to Life Sciences was high school biology, so I was curious about the space when I heard about BenchSci. Working in a space with a mission to directly impact how scientists conduct research and seeing the ripple effects that it could have on life-saving drug discovery was something I couldn’t pass on. I also spoke with really interesting people during the interview process, which gave me a good feeling about the company.
How would you describe the engineering culture at BenchSci?
Definitely, a lot of work to go around, haha! Overall it’s pretty great, everyone is willing to help and provide support when you ask. Teams and individuals are able to come up with projects and ideas for improvements and get them done. There’s also a wide range of experience and expertise on the team and we promote open communication so that everyone has opportunities to get feedback and learn from each other.
What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on at BenchSci so far?
They’ve all been pretty interesting, though one that stands out was when we recently worked on speeding up a part of our data pipelines in order to deliver data to users faster. At BenchSci, we have a ton of data, with several teams made up of scientists, machine learning specialists, and data engineers working to translate and move it through the pipeline. In the end, it comes to the Search team, where we take the data and make it user-friendly and easily searchable. With all these moving parts it can take some time, so we worked together to speed up the data delivery. It was an interesting journey with a big impact. We are now seeing a 3x improvement in data throughput in that stage of the pipeline and we have more improvements to come.
You’ve worked for companies in Lagos and Berlin, what do you appreciate the most about remote work and how has it changed where you want to work from?
I definitely appreciate the flexibility it provides. No daily commute means one less thing I need to think about day-to-day. I also appreciate being able to work with people from different parts of the world. Since work is pretty much wherever my laptop is, I’ve been able to explore the world more, both locally and internationally. Plus, I can do laundry while working from home. It’s super convenient!
What career advice do you have for young engineers who are interested in a leadership role?
Keep doing the work, and expand your capacity technically. I believe empathy is also key because your coworkers are people first with entire lives beyond the workday.
Teleportation or flying?
Depends, am I being cast for a scene in Avengers? Definitely teleportation. To explore the world? Definitely flying. It would be nice to take part in the journey more than just getting to the destination.
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