Pathfinder Career Narratives 13: Head of Autonomous Systems

Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all of the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Murray Ireland, Head of Autonomous Systems at Craft Prospect. You can find Craft Prospect here and on LinkedIn here.

Name: Dr Murray Ireland

Doctorate subject area and year of completion: Aerial Robots Guidance and Control, 2014

Role and employer: Head of Autonomous Systems, Craft Prospect

Approximate salary bracket of this type of role: £40-50,000 per annum.

An Attempt to Be an Academic 

For a while, it seemed like I was going to accidentally end up an academic. I finished my undergraduate at Glasgow with some great exam results and a solid degree, but in the process of getting through that final year, I’d neglected to properly plan for what comes after. I’d done a four-month placement at Clyde Space and made some good connections there, but a permanent job wasn’t available. Elsewhere, over-optimism about an engineering student’s likelihood of employability and a lack of workplace experience certainly didn’t help. A serendipitous call from one my undergraduate lecturers landed me a fully funded and very interesting PhD (“do you want to speed 3 years making small helicopters fly?” – “YES”). Even during my PhD though, I was guilty of going with the flow – generally being pushed towards writing that paper, or trying out those new techniques, or signing up for this transferable skills workshop. I enjoyed it, but I was also worried about getting that 200-page thesis written or, you know, finding a job.  

It wasn’t until my final few months that I took the reins more, figuring out that small nugget of novelty in my work that makes a PhD thesis. This, coupled with the epiphany that I had climbed my way out of the so-called valley of s**t, helped me realise that, actually, there was quite a lot to like about academia. Even in the midst of the ‘weekend-and-evening’ final stretch slog, I was thinking about my next move. 

Initially, I dabbled in a succession of short-term, often-parallel teaching and research contracts. The teaching – tutorials, summer courses, lectures with 20 students, lectures with 250 students – paid the bills but didn’t grab me in the way that problem solving and experimentation did. The research contracts started with the interesting (multi-agent aircraft simulation), progressed through the very interesting (autonomous UAV guidance) and culminated in that jewel of a postdoc – a full-time, year-long project doing Something Really Cool. That Something Really Cool in this case was figuring out fault detection approaches for Mars rovers and included building some Raspberry Pi-powered miniature rovers for testing. 

All throughout these contracts I got more proactive about planning my future – going to networking events, talking to the careers service, strengthening my CV with skills workshops and outreach activities (Glasgow Science Festival, Explorathon, open days). As I neared the end of my Mars rover postdoc, I started to consider an exit from academia. It had been a dream project but still suffered from that ever-present challenge of postdoctoral life – the fixed-term contract. After 3 years, I’d had enough of the never-ending hunt for postdoc contracts and just wanted to settle into something. Overworking has never been my jam – even through the majority of my PhD, thanks to a supervisor who realised he had a human student and not a paper-writing robot – and it seemed like overworking was a requirement to make the leap from postdoc to permanent academic. Moving to another university – an approach suggested by colleagues at Glasgow – didn’t appeal either. Too much of my personal life was tied to Glasgow to make that a palatable option. 

So I started seriously looking for jobs outside of academia in a field I could now say I had some experience in – space. A friend in the School of Engineering who I knew from my Clyde Space placement gave me some great pointers and leads, tapping me into a nascent Scottish space sector I had no idea existed. As it turns out, my placement supervisor from Clyde Space had recently left there and had started his own company. He was looking for some part-time support on a research and development contract to use machine learning on satellites. I’d done some work with satellites at Clyde Space and I knew next-to-nothing about machine learning but I had from my PhD and postdocs that skill that really comes in handy in a startup – the ability to do a bit of (almost) everything and do it quickly. One last-minute contract in a wonderfully-tangential research area to prop up my industry role and I had a foot out of the door of academia. 

My Time in Industry 

My half-and-half setup lasted a few months. During that time, Craft Prospect became sufficiently self-sustaining for me to go full-time and a couple of new colleagues to join. Since starting back in October 2017, my role has been varied, exciting, challenging and always busy. My time in academia – PhD and postdocs – equipped me with skills that have been invaluable in a startup and now a growing small business. From almost day 1, I’ve been involved in academia-like tasks including writing papers, attending conferences, researching and prototyping, running experiments and writing proposals. I also had a crash course into so many industry-specific things – project milestone meetings, sales pitches, datasheets, product roadmaps, timesheets (and many others). I use relatively few of the technical skills I gained during my undergrad, PhD and postdoc, but the transferable skills I developed and the greater ability to quickly gain at least a working understanding of most technical topics has been invaluable. 

These days, I’m in a senior role within Craft Prospect and still juggle a dozen different jobs. These are now a bit higher-level than my original activities, covering company operations planning and reporting, sitting in board meetings, leading our employee council, brainstorming and planning R&D work with industrial partners and leading a small but capable team to build autonomy and intelligence into spacecraft. One day, I’d love to come back to my earlier work and play a role in building a future Mars rover, complete with onboard intelligence and problem-solving skills. It’s on our latest technology roadmap – but in the meantime I need to keep juggling and improving all those transferable and technical skills to help the company win new work and secure its future. 

I wish I could provide a similar roadmap for how I got to my current place in life, but I can’t. It’s been a combination of luck and gradual accumulation of various skills which have come in useful at the right times. As an engineer, one good decision I can conclusively say I made was to learn the Python programming language during my postdoc career. Or to start learning it at least. This has been a gateway to so many technical topics in many post-academic career – machine learning, geographic information systems, simulation, 3D animation, data visualisation and even creation of activity schedules to operate spacecraft. Python may not be what you need in your career, but the notion of picking up a new language or two can often pay off in ways you’d never have suspected of. 

My current role really is a melting point of all the skills I’ve picked up and experiences I’ve had over my professional career. I love the freedom and autonomy I have – something I enjoyed in my brief academic career. The various pseudo-academic things I get to do in an R&D role are also great – I’m recently back from a big conference in the US and I regularly get to attend technical workshops and conferences across Europe to learn and network. I’ve mostly achieved this by just seeking out opportunities to learn and saying yes to new experiences. In these instances, I didn’t often have an agenda or a specific outcome to target, it was more just a case of seeing what happened. 

My final advice would be to any academics considering their next move is: find out what’s important to you and make it happen. I’ve never really known for sure what I enjoy, but it could be boiled down to ‘solving problems’. More critically, it was important for me to have a work-life balance and this, coupled with the perpetual uncertainty of postdoc contracts, cemented my exit from academia. Find out what matters to you and learn as much as you can in the meantime.