Another day, another career path story! But luckily, just like every individual is different at SimScale, so are their journeys here. Rubén, who is originally from Spain and a long-term team member, has been part of SimScale for almost 4.6 years! Originally joining our Application Engineering Team as an intern in 2018, he transitioned into becoming more and more of a Software Developer over the years. Keep reading as he shares some insights into his career journey at SimScale!
2018: Joining SimScale as an Intern
Rubén was studying in the UK and finishing one of his several master’s degrees. He had been interested in the field of CFD for many years and accumulated quite a broad knowledge. When the opportunity to join SimScale as an intern popped up, it seemed like the perfect match as he knew SimScale from using OpenFOAM. Fast forward and he sent an application, was invited to an interview, and after some technical rounds successfully hired! His SimScale journey started when he moved from the UK to Germany and started working as an Application Engineering intern. His responsibilities at the time were running projects for customers, helping them to develop the products, and being the simulation expert for them.
“SimScale is a horizontal company and what I really like is that you can speak directly to any person that you need, there is no level or bridge that you have to cross, everything is quite direct. Your opinion is always taken into account and you can see that this opinion has some real changes and ends up having an impact on the platform.”
Rubén Benito, CFD Development Engineer
Joining the Simulation Team
Initially, the plan was a 6-month Application Engineering internship, but after four months Rubén started collaborating with our Simulation Team too. Two months later, he had the great opportunity to receive offers from both teams. The difference between the two teams is the interaction you have with people. In our Application Engineering Team, you not only get to interact with the team but also work directly with our customers. Although not an easy decision, Rubén’s desire to gain more knowledge in programming and learn more about what happens behind the scenes at SimScale ultimately made him decide to join the Simulation Team (which now is split into two teams: Our OpenFOAM and CFD Team). Due to Rubén’s expertise in OpenFOAM, his responsibility was to help the team implement the radiation feature on the platform. Fast forward 4 years and Rubén still enjoys working in the OpenFOAM Team, where he is, together with the team, responsible for the CFD solver that uses OpenFOAM. The team focuses on maintaining and improving current features as well as developing new ones.
With a very diverse team when it comes to their backgrounds and expertise, Rubén didn’t initially come from a traditional software engineering background. Transitioning to the Simulation Team gave him the opportunity to learn about many different concepts like Docker, Kubernetes, our AWS infrastructure, and Git. SimScale has provided him with a deeper knowledge of C++ and many other languages, like Scala. Recently, he started working with Rust which helps him interact and collaborate with other Engineering teams.
“SimScale offered me all the resources that I needed to learn these things. It was a mixture of 3 things: courses and internet, asking questions to people, and the last one: working and using it.”
Over the years, his responsibilities changed from working in Quality Assurance, where he ensured a feature is validated and the simulation is giving scientific and physical results, to purely developing software. Progressively, he took on more and more development tasks and responsibilities and they have grown until now being the main part of his job. This transition happened about 1 to 2 years ago, from being a Simulation Engineer to now a CFD Developer.
Rubén’s Learning Path
Rubén describes his learning path at SimScale “as a trip that has not ended”. What he enjoys in our team is that he can’t see the end of his learning path, meaning that there are many things to learn and to broaden your horizon in many ways, such as getting deeper knowledge in CFD science, always playing with OpenFOAM, and learning new languages — “anything takes me to unknown places!”
Understanding the complexity of a platform such as SimScale, not only from the sales side but especially from the technical side, has been a great challenge for him over the past few years that have kept him continuously motivated and excited about his daily work. Moving forward, he is not quite sure yet where he sees himself. His path could be to deepen his technical skill set or to move more toward a leadership position.
“I see SimScale as a company that offers any path that we are interested in. I don’t have any doubts that I wouldn’t find either path for me in the future.”
We are very excited to see where Rubéns path at SimScale will take him and can’t wait to see him succeed even further!
Stay tuned for more insights into SimScale and see what the team has been up to on our @lifeatsimscale Instagram feed. Want to start your own SimScale story? Make sure to keep an eye on our careers page for possible openings!
