Meet Our Engineers: Caroline Gallagher

Want to know what it’s like to be an engineer at Bitsight? Check out this Q&A with a member of our engineering team to learn about her role as a software engineer, her experience, and more.

Name: Caroline Gallagher

Job Title: Software Engineer

Location: Cambridge, MA

What do you do at Bitsight?
I work on the frontend and middleware of our primary web application. For frontend work, I write React components, Redux bindings and lots of tests. Meanwhile, my work in the middleware is writing Python django APIs.

How long have you worked at Bitsight?
8 months

What is your background? How did you get into engineering?
I took a computer science class during my first semester of college to fulfill a distribution requirement after a friend told me that I might like CS. I didn't feel like I understood enough CS after that class, so I took another, and then had a CS summer research internship, and was hooked from there!

What challenges you the most at Bitsight?
Shipping new features quickly while maintaining a high level of quality.

What is your biggest accomplishment and the most important thing you learned at Bitsight?
I'm proud of how much that my frontend knowledge has grown here. I learned Redux (I was already familiar with React), and even my HTML/CSS design skills have improved.

What advice do you have for someone first getting into this field?
Software engineers are incredibly lucky to often be in the position to choose their job from among multiple offers. Choose a company where the engineers will be happy to answer questions and excited to teach you things. Being able to brainstorm ideas with other engineers here, as well as ask innumerable questions without worrying that my coworkers are frustrated with me for asking, has helped me to grow so much as an engineer.

What are some other companies you admire from an engineering perspective and why?
From a "how they treat software engineers perspective", Google. From a "they do cool tech perspective", Spacex.

If you weren’t an engineer, what would you want to be?
I would be getting my PhD in economics; I double-majored in CS and economics, and definitely spent some time in college trying to decide which path to follow! That being said, I love my job and couldn't be happier with my decision.

What do you like to do for fun?
Running (my recent race was a 4K on the 4th of July), yoga, reading books, dinners with friends.

What is the last place you traveled and what did you do there?
I traveled to York, Maine a few weekends ago to spend time with family. It was still pretty cold, so we watched the ocean, went for a morning run, and had some great food.

What was the last book you read?
"Chaos Monkeys" by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Want to join the Bitsight team?