add first week at TR

brainsteam/content/posts/2025/01/first-week-at-tr.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+title: "First Week at Tr"
+date: 2025-01-12T06:54:24Z
+draft: false
+description: A summary of my new job and my first week there.
+url: /2025/1/12/first-week-at-tr
+type: posts
+tags:
+  - personal
+  - work
+---
+
+As I mentioned in previous posts, at the end of November, [I left my job as CTO at Filament](https://brainsteam.co.uk/2024/11/29/end-of-an-era/) and took December off to rest and recuperate. I started my new role on Monday. I've joined Thomson Reuters' Labs team as a Research Engineering Manager. I'm very excited about the role and joining a team with a really good reputation for high-quality research and software engineering with elements of machine learning and natural language processing. I've also been reflecting on the fact that I'm returning to a very large organisation for the first time in nearly a decade since I left IBM. In many ways, it's actually a bit of a relief to be joining a company with dedicated cybersecurity and data privacy teams after spending the last few years dealing with these things myself.
+
+My role consists of two main themes. Firstly, I'll be managing a team of high-performing software engineers scattered around the globe from Switzerland to Brazil. Secondly, I'll be working with Labs colleagues and product teams across the business to scope and deliver proofs of concept that enhance existing TR products. I'll be working with cutting-edge models, programming languages, tools, and most importantly, some very clever people. Whilst the core parts of my new role are quite hands off, I hope to stay practical by doing PRs and maybe even delivering small features, by dedicating my 10% time to hands-on projects and by continuing to code in my spare time on projects like Pen Parse and my website.
+
+The team is mainly made up of engineers and data scientists with strings of letters after their name and many years of experience in industry and/or academia. I was initially a little nervous going into this environment but as well as being knowledgeable, everyone has been friendly, approachable and empathetic on top of all other accolades and they made me feel right at home very quickly.
+
+I'll be spending 3 days a week working from home and 2 days a week on site in the swanky London office. The office space is modern and spacious right in the middle of Canary wharf, The TR labs lean have dedicated space there and a pretty good in-person presence, at least on the days I'll be going in. There is a regular team lunch where we all get together and eat which means most people chose to come in on the same day for that. There is also branded swag to help instil that all important sense of belonging. I was given TR Labs t-shirt, hoodie, moleskine and stickers!
+
+My first week has been full of onboarding activities and intro calls and form filling but I'm already having a great time and I feel really privileged to have been able to join such a high performing-but-humble-and-friendly team at this stage in my career. I'm really excited to see what week 2 brings!