New Job at Kitware

In January I started looking for a job as my postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh was due to end in September. I took a break from this to attend Camp KDE, the first KDE meeting held west of the Atlantic. I gave two halves of two talks (so a whole talk in total) where I talked about two things I work on in the open source world - scientific visualization and packaging.

Bill Hoffman also attended the meeting and gave a talk about CMake. While watching his talk (and I think the same happened while he was watching my talks) it clicked that Kitware would be a great fit. Once I got back to Pittsburgh I sent off a copy of my CV, and they very quickly set up some phone interviews. After that they flew me out to Clifton Park for quite an interview, if you get me over a few beers I might tell you all about it...

The more I learned about Kitware the more I liked it. Their language of choice is C++, they do a lot of scientific visualization, such as ParaView, work with national labs, academics and companies on interesting scientific problems. Then there are the software process, cross platform build, test and packaging projects. They even use Qt, and will likely use it more now the license has changed. Most of their software is released under an open source license too! I really got on with Bill and his family when I met them at Camp KDE, and came away with a very good impression of Kitware after the interview.

I accepted a job offer for the position of research and development engineer at Kitware in Clifton Park, NY. Due to being British, and various visa issues I will not be starting there until October (assuming all the visa paperwork falls into place). My wife and I are very excited about this opportunity at Kitware. So wish me luck, I am leaving academia after quite a long stay. Don’t tell anyone at Kitware, but most of the stuff they want me to do I would gladly do in my spare time They are still looking for more developers, especially people with C++ and Qt experience if you are on the job market too.