What path has your career taken since graduation? 

I did several internships with Allegro MicroSystems where I did analogue design. It was interesting and I could use everything from my studies but I decided to move back to Bulgaria so I couldn't continue on that path.

There I started some really interesting jobs:

 I worked for 2 years at Antelope Audio where I reverse engineered some of the most famous pieces of musical electronics. I ended up disassembling actual pieces of history, tested, simulated and tried to approximate their behavior for audio processing. This really helped me make the change from electronics to software. My analogue background was very useful for figuring out how the analogue audio processing worked as I learned the software skills to emulate it. DSP courses helped a lot here as well.

I then switched to a completely software company in the same domain: Smule. Here my electronics wasn't that useful but the audio processing and DSP to some extent are still quite relevant.

What is your current role?

I am a Python Engineer at Smule which is a karaoke app. My main focus is on Music Information Retrieval topics in the company which is essentially using DSP + ML on music (audio, lyrics, metadata) to get data that can be used by the company or the users.

Typically what I do is go over any alerts or dashboards and make sure everything runs fine. I would spend time on improving a specific process (make it run faster/more accurately/with less errors) or improve the development setup (tests, containers). This could involve reading papers, trying things out, going over logs and lots of meetings. 

What experiences do you feel helped you get to your current position?

The most difficult part was switching from electronics to software. Finding a job that required both software and hardware knowledge and then switching to a software one based in the same domain (audio) made it a lot easier.

I did spend time on coursera to improve my coding and learn some ML fundamentals.

How have you used the skills and/or knowledge developed during your degree in your career?

I've been using anything I learned in DSP courses and programming as a base for figuring out audio processing and ML. Both analogue and digital electronics were very useful in reverse engineering electronics and teaching me how to think on difficult problems. 

What advice would you give to students who are interested in your area of work?

I wish I had done more exchanges/trips/internships in a different city or country while in university. 

This profile was published in March 2024