Sumaira Ahmed is a Software Engineer at Audacia. Her path into tech began at a careers event showcasing the real-world impact of digital solutions, including programming drones to locate earthquake victims and digitising health records to make them more accessible. After studying Computer Science at university, Sumaira joined the Audacia Academy in 2024. Since joining, she has worked across internal projects and client-facing work in the financial services sector.
What was the Academy like, and how did it prepare you for client projects?
I knew I wanted to join the Academy before I'd even finished university, and I'm so glad I did. What makes it so valuable is the practical grounding it gives you. You're working with real workflows, collaborating with other people, navigating conflicting priorities and having your work tested by someone else. By the time I joined my first client project, the experience felt immediately familiar because the Academy had already put me through it.
It also made me a better developer in a more fundamental way. Rather than focusing only on the task in front of me, I had to start thinking about the full lifecycle of my work, and that shift in mindset has stayed with me ever since.
What does your day-to-day as a Software Engineer look like?
At its core, the job is about taking a client's requirements and turning them into something they can use. That might be something relatively small, like an additional search function on an existing page, but the process is always the same: understand what's already there, figure out the best way to implement it and make sure it's properly testable.
Day to day, I work in a small team with a developer and a tester, each focused on a specific work stream for a couple of months at a time. We work in two-week sprints, and at the end of each one we hold a retrospective to reflect on what went well, what we'd do differently and what we need from the client to keep moving forward. Estimation sessions are also a big part of my week - working through upcoming tasks as a team to agree on priorities and figure out how long things will realistically take.
What projects have you worked on at Audacia?
My first project was an internal one - the Olympus system, which is Audacia's own project tracking and management platform. We built a centralised system so everything was in one place and accessible to everyone. I worked on the project management and timesheet elements and also helped close a legacy system and migrate its data. That migration was a really satisfying challenge to work through.
From there I moved on to a large client project with a major insurance and financial services organisation, focused on invoicing and payment systems. It's a much bigger operation with multiple Audacia teams working on different parts of the same product - which has meant learning to collaborate not just within my own team, but across teams whose work overlaps with ours.
What is it like working across multiple teams on a large software project?
Working across multiple teams adds a layer of complexity that you don't get on smaller software projects, but it's also where a lot of the growth happens. You have to communicate much more carefully about how your work connects to what other developers and testers are doing, and that's made me sharper about thinking through the effects of any change I make.
There are real benefits too. Being part of a large project means you have a whole community of developers around you, including people with far more experience than you. There's always someone to learn from or talk something through with.
What is the culture like at Audacia?
What stands out most to me is the commitment to building a genuine technical community. Seniors and principals are consistently approachable and invested in helping people grow. I've never felt like I was bothering someone by asking a question. That kind of environment makes a real difference, especially earlier in your career.
There's also a strong culture of structured knowledge sharing. We have monthly technical events, tech talks and lunch and learns, all designed to give people a space to upskill, share a demo or learn from what others are working on. The fact that senior people volunteer their own time to run these sessions says a lot about the culture here.
What opportunities are there outside of your day-to-day role?
The technical community extends beyond events too. When GitHub Copilot licences were rolled out, for example, there was a structured launch with setup guides, worked examples and a shared space to see how colleagues were already using it and what they'd learned. As engineers we're constantly picking up new tools and having that kind of support in place takes a lot of the friction out of it.
I'm also a member of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion group, which I've found really rewarding. We plan events throughout the year, and the business genuinely gives us the time and resource to make them happen. This year we’ve run an event on neurodiversity at work and hosted an Eid celebration meal that were really well attended and sparked some great conversations. It's good to have the space to organise things like that, and equally good that people across the company feel they have the space to show up.
What is your favourite part of working at Audacia?
The technical community is what I value most about working at Audacia. The culture of knowledge sharing genuinely makes day-to-day work better.
When it comes to the work itself, what I love most is seeing the impact of what we build. Something as small as improving a search function can take real friction out of someone's working day. At the other end of the scale, you might be working on a system handling millions of pounds, where the question becomes: how do we make sure this is watertight, how do we give our clients full confidence in what's happening under the surface? That's a much bigger problem, but it's the same instinct - making something work well for the people who rely on it.
Working at Audacia also means you're constantly getting an inside view of how different businesses operate - their processes, their priorities, the way they think about problems. It's the kind of insight you'd never get working in a single industry, and it means there's always something new to learn.
Audacia is a leading software development company based in the UK, with headquarters in Leeds. Find out more about what it's like to work here and our current open vacancies on our careers site.
