# Experience > Professional experience of Robbie Palmer — ML expert | Full-stack builder | Team lead who ships - HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/experience ## Engineering Manager at [Terminal Industries](https://terminal-industries.com/) May 2024 - Present · Belfast, UK Titles held: - Engineering Manager (Mar 2026 - Present) - Principal Software Engineer (May 2024 - Mar 2026) Building real-time computer vision products and ML pipelines, while driving engineering practices for a startup transitioning from pre-product to production. - Built real-time computer vision products for multi-stream video and image analysis, for identifier identification in complex environments - Engineered ML pipelines with data version control, benchmarking infrastructure, and end-to-end observability powered by Grafana Cloud (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) - Developed web services, Terraform managed infrastructure, and LLM-powered document analysis solutions - Built internal tools in TypeScript and React, and contributed to API servers in Go - Project managed cross-functional teams and drove agile development practices that accelerated time-to-market - Was pivotal in transitioning from pre-product to production, delivering the MVP to market and establishing lean engineering practices for rapid iteration Technologies: Python, Terraform, Grafana, Prometheus, DVC, Google Gemini, TypeScript, GitHub Actions, TensorRT, Go, AWS, OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers, Leaflet ## Machine Learning Lead at [Bestomer](https://bestomer.com/) May 2023 - Feb 2024 · Remote, UK Led ML strategy at a seed-stage startup, building pipelines, evaluating build-vs-buy decisions, and developing full-stack prototypes. - Led ML strategy and built end-to-end ML pipelines for training, evaluation, and deployment - Optimized, evaluated, and integrated ML models powering semantic search, image similarity search, invoice extraction, product detection, and RAG-based chatbots - Developed backend services in Python and TypeScript and contributed to iOS application development - Assessed third-party services to inform build-vs-buy decisions through rapid experimentation - Built CI/CD pipelines and implemented infrastructure as code to streamline deployment and operations Technologies: TypeScript, Node.js, Fastify, Prisma, Postgresql, Weaviate, Python, FastAPI, Pulumi, AWS, GitHub Actions, DVC, Swift, Hugging Face, OpenRouter, Google Gemini, OpenAI ## Customer Innovation Engineer II at [Confluent](https://confluent.io/) Apr 2022 - May 2023 · Belfast, UK Designed and built ML-driven data streaming solutions, wearing multiple hats across engineering, product, and customer-facing roles. - Designed and engineered machine-learning-driven data-streaming solutions - Acted as software engineer, product owner, project manager and technical consultant - Built high-performance stream-processing applications and extensions for ksqlDB and Kafka Connect - Developed real-time PII-redaction capabilities using NLP for low-latency data streams - Leveraged open-source software contributions to establish a strategic partnership with Microsoft - Aided pre-sales and marketing momentum via customer discovery calls, blog posts, and conference booth representation Technologies: Kafka, Kotlin, Python, Google BigQuery, spaCy, SemaphoreCI, DVC ## Senior Machine Learning Engineer at [Sonrai Analytics](https://sonraianalytics.com/) Mar 2020 - Apr 2022 · Belfast, UK Technical lead for Data Science at an early-stage health-tech startup, shaping engineering practices and building computer vision pipelines for pathology. - Acted as technical lead for the Data Science team, making foundational architectural decisions and mentoring junior engineers - Developed computer vision models for semantic segmentation, multiple instance learning and object localisation - Engineered full machine learning pipelines, managing algorithms, data sampling, modelling, versioning and iteration - As the 9th employee, drove best practices site-wide, setting direction for MLOps, DevOps, process management and hiring practices - Developed libraries which massively accelerated development, reducing the development time of a new app from weeks to a day - Led research and engineering for a microsatellite instability classification initiative that secured millions in NHS funding Technologies: Python, PyTorch, FastAPI, Plotly, Leaflet, Docker, AWS, Bitbucket Pipelines, DVC, GeoPandas ## Senior Software Engineer at [Philips](https://www.philips.co.uk/healthcare/specialty/health-informatics) Jul 2017 - Mar 2020 · Belfast, UK Titles held: - Senior Software Engineer (Apr 2018 - Mar 2020) - Software Engineer (Apr 2018 - Sep 2019) - Graduate Software Engineer (Jul 2017 - Apr 2018) Led development of production-grade computer vision for computational pathology, from algorithm design through to scalable deployment. - Led development of production-grade computer vision solutions for computational pathology - Drove algorithm conception, data collection and engineering, and deep learning model development - Developed scalable runtime environments and integrated with web applications - Advanced from Graduate Software Engineer (2017) to Senior Software Engineer (2019) through accelerated performance and impact Technologies: Python, OpenCV, Keras, Docker, Jenkins, RabbitMQ, Ansible ## Research Assistant / Software Engineer Summer Intern at [Ulster University](https://www.ulster.ac.uk/) Jul 2016 - Sep 2016 · Belfast, UK Built Arduino-based CubeSat prototypes implementing university research on self-managing autonomous systems. - Worked on SPAAACE project developing self-managing systems for CubeSats - Built Arduino-based prototypes implementing autonomic computing principles - Translated academic research into working embedded systems prototypes Technologies: Arduino, C++ ## Software Development Intern at [Microsoft](https://www.microsoft.com/) Jul 2015 - Jun 2016 · London, UK Improved Bing auto-suggest across all platforms through code optimization, big data analysis, and interactive dashboards. - Designed, developed and tested C# code improving auto-suggest across all platforms - Optimised large portions of the Bing search stack for performance - Carried out in-depth big data analysis on logs to inform optimization decisions - Developed interactive dashboards for monitoring and analysis Technologies: C#, .NET, T-SQL ## Software Development Intern at [Infosys](https://www.infosys.com/) Jun 2014 - Sep 2014 · Pune, India Built an NLP-powered system that generated graph databases from semantic analysis of web content. - Developed a system integrating NLP analysis with graph database storage - Built semantic relationship mapping for web-page content analysis - Designed and implemented graph database schema for semantic information Technologies: Java, Stanford NLP, Neo4j --- Markdown index of this site: https://robbiepalmer.me/llms.txt