Interview with Zarrar Jadoon, a Darwin software developer

If you’re wondering what it’s like to work for Darwin, here’s a quick interview with one of our employees to give you some insight.

Zarrar Jadoon is one of our software developers, working with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). He’s planning to start his own business, using some of the skills he’s refined at Darwin, but we had a chat with him before he left.

Hi, Zarrar. How long have you been working for Darwin?

I’ve been working with Darwin for about a year. I started working at the Harwell campus in early 2020, but from March we started working from home because of the COVID situation.

How was the transition to working from home?

At the start, it was a bit hard; I wasn’t used to working from home, and I needed to set up my office and everything. I was thinking, ‘Oh, no, this isn’t going to work.’ But I went into my living room and went, ‘Okay, this table will be mine,’ and I built my own small office from there. After a week or two, I felt so comfortable working from home. It was amazing to realise it was something I could actually do.

What were you doing before Darwin?

I started working with Darwin while I was finishing my Master’s degree in Advanced Computer Science at Oxford Brookes. I’d previously done some freelance work as well.

What’s your role at Darwin?

I work in the software development team, on the front end. I’ve been creating a website that collects and processes data from CAVs. It fetches real-time data from automated vehicles and presents the information clearly to the user, using graphs and charts, so they can see, for example, the speed and location of the car.

It’s really interesting work. It’s amazing to work with new technology. We’ve been using React, and it’s very quick and lightweight.

How have you found the experience of working with Darwin?

There have been a lot of opportunities for learning, and also for working as a team. I used to work as a freelancer on individual projects, so being part of a team was a new experience for me. It took me a little time to get used to that level of communication, but slowly my team pushed me to communicate more and to become more comfortable with meetings. I think I learnt a lot from that.

The team are amazing. They support me in everything. I really feel I’ve had a lot of help here, even working from home. You can just email or text anyone in the Darwin team if you need something.

What’s your favourite thing about the work you’ve been doing here?

Learning new technology and being involved in such a big, exciting project. The work with Harwell has been an amazing experience for me, seeing how CAVs can send real-time data to the cloud and how it can be retrieved in a millisecond. I think that’s very impressive.

Thank you so much to Zarrar for taking the time to answer our questions! It’s been good to have you with us, and we wish you the best in your future endeavours.

Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.