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Comment by gripfx | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is interested, the software team I work for is hiring! F1 is definitely an interesting challenge and a unique work environment.

Find out more here: https://jobs.redbull.com/at-de/bicester-scuderia-alphatauri-...

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I'm probably not up for a move to the UK, but if you don't mind, could you tell us a bit more about your job?

What sort of projects have you been able to work on? What's the work culture like? Do you find the actual technical problems you work on exciting, or is it more the domain that excites you (i.e. building and operating a racecar)?

Sure. The role (and myself) are in the aerodynamics department, developing and maintaining software for the aerodynamicists. The role of the aerodynamicist is to develop the bodywork of the car (wings, ducts, chassis shape etc) to improve aerodynamic efficiency. This is done primarily in computational fluid dynamics simulations [1] (virtual) and scale model testing in a wind tunnel [2] (physical) before being tested on the actual race car. My group works on the software to analyse the data output. Think data science dashboards with lots of real time and historical data. Due to our requirements, the tools are designed in house with input from users. In my time here I have worked on interfacing with the HPC cluster, improving visualisations and improving our backend stack amongst other things.

For your last question, it is a bit of both. I went to university with the goal of working in F1 and the competitive aspect is definitely there but as I was not a comp sci student the technical problems are still interesting. Developing aero is very visual heavy as ideas are implemented as 3D CAD designs and often reviewed as such. So it's not just a more complicated stock ticker that needs to be shown.

[1]: https://static.carthrottle.com/workspace/uploads/posts/2016/...

[2]: https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/2/1000/425/5/uploads/p...

This sounds like a great blend of Mechanical and Software Engineering. It would be a bit of a commute from the US unfortunately.

I've always been curious... do you worry about job security given how teams are sold and/or restructured every other year and how heavily they dependend on sponsors and results?

That is an interesting question. For me personally, no, not at my current life situation. For the most part, teams are subsidiaries of larger corporations and there is a little bit of security there. The privateer teams other than that pose some job security risk but most staff are highly skilled (normally to a post graduate level) and would be no different than joining a startup which might go bust at the end of runway.

I thought you guys were all in Milton Keynes, never been to your wind tunnel over there. Looks nice. Former AVL F1 engineer supporting all teams.

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