What does your job entail on a day-to-day basis?
As my title suggests, I wear many hats. I deal on a daily basis with our CCD technology customers, managing the product portfolio and making sure that our customers are getting the devices they need as soon as possible. In addition, I deal with quality issues and product applications. Our products have many different variants and I often have to talk customers through the different options that are available. I also have a team of product engineers reporting to me, as well as customer services people in Europe. I would say my role is very customer facing; the front end of the CCD business.
Who are your customers and where are they based?
We work with many large space agencies around the world, as well as a large number of scientific camera OEMs and astronomy institutes. Our customers are based all over the world. A major customer for us is Andor, part of the Oxford Instruments and located in Belfast. They make a wide range of high performance scientific cameras using our CCD image sensors.
It’s all about building relationships. In the scientific camera industry, working relationships between clients and suppliers are usually fairly stable because of the level of expertise required both at sensor and camera level. Most of the competition to my product portfolio comes from the alternative CMOS technology, however this is less well suited to the niche applications our CCDs are used for. The two technologies will continue to co-exist for many years to come and both are offered by Teledyne.
In the astronomy market we work with a wide range of customers who are often developing one-of-a-kind instruments for specific projects to expand our understanding of the universe.
Our focus is on delivering and improving upon on our existing portfolio, tailoring existing products to meet our customers’ varied requirements.
How important is quality control in your role?
Quality is hugely important for a number of reasons. Teledyne Space Imaging – and, in fact, Teledyne as a whole – is well-known for its quality. Our products are used in extremely demanding scientific applications so the need for a high level of quality is paramount. We are continuously working with our customers to ensure that they are getting exactly what we say we're going to deliver. While we have lots of quality procedures and service checks that we put our products through, our customers are often pushing performance to the limit. My team becomes involved when specific issues arise and provide feedback to the production team to continually improve quality.
You are currently recruiting for some more people to join your team. Tell me about that. What are your views about recruitment at Teledyne? How straightforward is it?
We are currently looking for a Product Engineer to join our team, with at least three years’ prior experience. I’m hopeful that we will find someone highly qualified who will be a good fit for the team. The person I last recruited for the role had left the business previously but came back when the role became available. She has since been promoted to a Team Lead role within Teledyne.
That seems to be an ongoing theme. People tend to stay at Teledyne, or come back from another job further down the line. It's a great place to work. When a company puts a lot of emphasis on helping people progress in their careers like we do, that is a very attractive incentive to stay. We have many people in the business that have been here for a very long time. If you want to work towards progression then Teledyne offers many opportunities to do that.
What is the best thing for you about working in the space industry?
I really enjoy working with cutting edge technologies. Our products get used in such a wide range of interesting applications, from space imaging to microscopy applications; spectroscopy to X-ray. I'm constantly finding new and interesting applications that people want to use our products for.
I also get to travel a bit, which keeps the job interesting. I'm going to San Francisco in January for the Photonics West conference. We have a booth there, alongside many other Teledyne companies. Although I will be talking about what Teledyne does in the space imaging sector, the show covers all sorts of photonics applications and innovations. Every kind of imaging you could imagine will be there and I am looking forward to seeing what inspiration and lessons we can take back from it to apply to our projects in 2025 and beyond.
