At Embotech…
we are about 30 individuals. We carry 10 nationalities & half of our last names are likely to twist your tongue. We have a team full of bright minds & full of diverse characters.
Meet us in our sequence “EMBOSTORIES”, featuring one employee each month, providing a little insight into our company.
Our July Embostory is presenting Antoine Seewer.
EMBOSTORY JULY: Antoine Seewer
Q: How long have you been working at Embotech?
A: Since April 2018.
Q: What is your academic background?
A: I have a Master’s degree from ETH’s Robotics, Systems and Control program.
Q: 3 words you would use to describe Embotech?
A: Flexible, fresh, exciting.
Q: How is Embotech helping your career development?
A: My job at Embotech gives me the possibility to develop my software skills in a professional environment and to use my theoretical knowledge in real-life pro-jects. Working for an SME also gives me the opportunity to be part of the full product development chain and to learn a lot about project management, certi-fication processes etc.
Q: What is your current position and what does it mean?
A: I am a Motion Planning Software Engineer. I am mostly working on the Pro-Parker product, a motion planning software for low-speed vehicles with car-like behavior. I am involved in the different parts of the product development chain, from software architecture and design to software certification, including algo-rithm design and implementation, integration work and on-site testing for cus-tomers, continuous integration and project management.
Q: Could you give us a quick description of what your typical workday looks like?
A: Well, every morning we have a daily scrum meeting to wrap up what we achieved the day before and which tasks we are going to tackle next. Then I start implementing new features or tests for ProParker and its different components or I try to debug unexpected behaviors or failures. This daily routine is inter-spersed by some meetings, customer calls and from time to time the descaling of the coffee machine.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: Its flexibility and the fact that I can contribute to some cutting-edge technol-ogy in a really stimulating environment and relaxed work atmosphere.
Q: What is most challenging part of your job?
A: Hm, you mean apart from surviving the summer without air conditioning?
It is often demanding to find the right balance between fast development and compliance with software development standards. When testing something new, you want to validate your idea as quickly as possible. But on the other hand you still want to follow industry standards so that once your idea turns out to be a good one, you don’t have to start from scratch again.
Q: What has been your favorite project since working at Embotech and why?
A: I can’t tell, it is still secret! This answer is coming along with a mysterious smile.
Q: If you had the chance to do another job for the fun of one day, what would it be?
A: I guess it would be nice to be mountain guide for one day, being outside, en-joying the fresh air of the Swiss mountains and sharing all this with your custom-ers. This is maybe the only downside of working for a software company, except for on-site testings, you are mostly confine in front of your screens…
Q: Let’s jump to the last question: Something your colleagues at Embotech cer-tainly don’t know about you yet?
A: Somehow Swiss are expected to be on time by nature. But once when I had to catch a flight with some colleagues, we proved the world otherwise: After our flight had been delayed and gates had been changed several times, we kind of missed the final flight announcements. After a while, noticing the lack of activity at our gate, we realized it had been changed once more so we had to run at full speed through half the airport. The gate people were already closing the doors but let us pass without even taking the time to control our boarding passes. Only the flight crew was taking their job extremely serious and decided we would de-serve an extra lesson on “safety-on-board” inflight passenger instructions and started from scratch again. As you can imagine, the other 200 passengers on board where not thrilled to go through it all over again!