Fibre Designer makes an Irish Connection

My father was a big inspiration to me so I suppose it’s no surprise that I followed in his footsteps and ended up studying mechanical engineering at college. It might seem like an unlikely choice for a woman in Ireland but it’s different in Latvia, where I come from. There are so many women engineers and no-one thinks anything of it.

As it turned out, the mechanical engineering skills I studied were a great foundation for what I am doing now, but I am in quite a different field. Mobile and fibre were exploding everywhere when I started looking for work – fibre to the edge, fibre to the home – so I could see there was more chance of a long-term future in telecoms than engineering. I was familiar with AutoCAD and Excel, which are used in network planning and design, so at least I had some skills that I could easily apply to telecoms.

WORKING FOR TELCOS

Before coming to Ireland to work on Indigo’s fibre projects (operating as 4site in Ireland), I spent six years working in Portugal doing mobile and fibre design for telcos like Vodafone and Portugal Teleco. During this time my husband got a job in Ireland and was only able to come home to visit our son and me once a month. We did this for two years but it was difficult and we decided that we’d move to Ireland to join him. I had only just updated LinkedIn when a position came up at 4site. They got straight back to me and I was invited for an interview.

I was very nervous, practically shaking, because I was in a new country, my English wasn’t great, and I knew nobody. But they were very nice to me and made me feel very relaxed. At the end of the interview they offered me a job! We all knew it would be a good fit and they asked me when I could start. It was amazing.

My network design experience in Portugal was a great help. 4site were working on SIRO, a really interesting project that uses the country’s electrical network to bring fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) in towns across Ireland. Connections to buildings could be underground or overground – it was our job to design the most efficient route. The project was a new type of technical challenge for me, but the tools were the same. I use AutoCAD drawings to design how the fibre is distributed, split and then connected to lots of premises.

Promotion and Problem Solving

Within a year I was promoted and now I work as a Fibre Design QC on behalf of the NBI who is designing, building and operating the new high-speed fibre broadband network for rural Ireland.

I love the work. I like it best when there’s a problem to solve and you have to get to the bottom of it. If it happens it’s at the build stage. They take our plan and occasionally run into an issue that we couldn’t have anticipated. The result might be a loss of signal somewhere between the network centre and the connection to the premises. It can be really difficult to discover the cause but it’s very satisfying when it’s resolved.

The first months were a steep learning curve as I adapted to 4site’s way of working and leant about SIRO. It was made easier by my colleagues who were very supportive and quickly became friends.

Because I live in Newbridge and 4site are based in Limerick I work [before the Covid19 pandemic] in an office space 10 minutes away from my home. I go to work there every day and work remotely, staying in touch with colleagues over Microsoft Teams. Before the Covid-19 pandemic I would go down to Limerick every Friday which keeps me connected to my team. It’s the best of both worlds and the perfect work-life balance.

If you think you would suit the 4site culture, contact us now. (even if there are no obvious open roles, we want to talk to any analytical problem-solvers interested in an engineering job!)