DESCENT LOG · EDINBURGH, UK · ORBITAL INSERTION NOMINAL

MATTHEW
WOODS

Robotics & Software Engineer — I build software for machines that work in hard places — from flight search at web scale to robots that crawl ship hulls.

THE DESCENT: SKYSCANNER +11km → PETROLEUM EXPERTS 0m → SCRUBMARINE −60m

FLIGHT LOG 01 · TROPOSPHERE — CRUISE ALTITUDE

Skyscanner

Software Engineer · 2018 — 2021 · Edinburgh, UK

Flight search at planetary scale. Hundreds of millions of travellers, billions of prices, milliseconds to answer.

[PLACEHOLDER] Built and operated high-throughput backend services powering flight search for 100M+ monthly travellers.
[PLACEHOLDER] Cut p99 search latency by double digits through caching and query-planning improvements.
[PLACEHOLDER] Designed data pipelines feeding pricing and availability into the search index.
[PLACEHOLDER] Ran A/B experiments end-to-end, from hypothesis to shipped ranking changes.

JavaPythonAWSKubernetesKafkaTerraform

WAYPOINT · SURFACE — TOUCHDOWN

Edinburgh

MEng Mechanical Engineering · Heriot-Watt University · 2014 — 2018

The descent touches down where it started — Edinburgh. Home city, and where I studied engineering at Heriot-Watt University.

[PLACEHOLDER] Born and raised in Edinburgh; still based here between deployments.
[PLACEHOLDER] MEng Mechanical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University.
[PLACEHOLDER] Masters project in autonomous systems — the on-ramp to everything below.

FLIGHT LOG 02 · SURFACE — NORTH SEA PLATFORM

Petroleum Experts

Senior Software Engineer · 2021 — 2023 · Edinburgh, UK

Engineering software for the subsurface: modelling how oil, gas and water move through reservoirs, wells and pipelines.

[PLACEHOLDER] Developed numerical simulation features in the IPM suite used by petroleum engineers worldwide.
[PLACEHOLDER] Implemented multiphase-flow solver improvements in performance-critical C++.
[PLACEHOLDER] Built tooling that halved regression-test turnaround for the modelling team.
[PLACEHOLDER] Worked directly with domain engineers to translate physics into shippable software.

C++C#Numerical MethodsWin32Python

FLIGHT LOG 03 · SUBSEA — PLATFORM UNDERSIDE

Scrubmarine

Robotics Engineer · 2023 — Present · Edinburgh, UK

Underwater robots that clean ship hulls — cutting fuel burn, emissions and the spread of invasive species, one barnacle at a time.

[PLACEHOLDER] Own the control and autonomy stack for a hull-cleaning ROV operating in live marine environments.
[PLACEHOLDER] Built sensor fusion for localisation against a moving, curved, low-visibility steel surface.
[PLACEHOLDER] Designed the operator interface: live telemetry, mission planning and replay.
[PLACEHOLDER] Took hardware from prototype to repeated commercial deployments in-harbour.

ROS 2C++PythonEmbedded LinuxCANComputer Vision

SIGNAL LOST · YOU'VE LEFT THE MAP

Thanks for making the trip down.

That's the whole descent — orbit to seabed. If any of it resonated, the channel's open.

hello@matts.cv LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ Readable CV / PDF →