Contract Mechatronics Engineer — Data Engineering

Alongside the embedded control system work, from February 2020 I took on a data engineering contract that pulled me deeper into software: building data processing scripts and workflows in Python for a client who needed to make sense of large volumes of time series data.

The client supplied their data in raw text formats, which meant the first job was building reliable cleaning and ingestion pipelines before anything useful could be done with it. Once cleaned, the data was loaded into a local database — using InfluxDB and Grafana for time series storage and visualisation, and SQL for querying — so it could be queried on demand to produce a series of ongoing reports.

It’s a good example of how mechatronics work in industry rarely stays confined to hardware — sensors and control systems only matter if the data they produce can actually be turned into something people can act on. This contract ran through to June 2022.