About Sarah
Sarah Gibson is a highly skilled software developer and cloud infrastructure engineer with a strong track record of enabling open, data-driven research at scale. With 6+ years of experience at the intersection of technology, research, and education — spanning a pioneering tech nonprofit and a leading national institute for data science and AI — Sarah brings both deep technical expertise and a passion for collaboration.
She specialises in designing and deploying cloud-based solutions that empower researchers to tackle complex, data-intensive challenges. Her work accelerates scientific discovery by making cutting-edge tools more accessible, scalable, and reproducible. An active contributor to the open-source community, Sarah champions open science practices and builds infrastructure that ensures research outputs are reusable and transparent.
Driven by a belief in the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, Sarah thrives on partnering with domain experts to turn ambitious research goals into reality. Whether architecting robust cloud systems or advocating for open, equitable technology, she’s committed to creating lasting impact across research and education.
Experience
Open Source Infrastructure Engineer
2021 - Present · 2i2c
- Designed, deployed, and maintained resilient cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including production-grade Kubernetes clusters.
- Enabled automatic backup creation and management of Google Filestore instances storing critical customer data, ensuring reliable disaster recovery in production environments, by designing a robust Python application deployed via a Helm chart.
- Improved system reliability and delivery speed by defining and implementing infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines to automate and parallelise deployments.
- Significantly improved deployment efficiency and reduced operational overhead by enabling an intelligent CI/CD pipeline that selectively redeploys only impacted environments through detection of file level changes in Python and GitHub Actions.
- Improved operational efficiency across the engineering team by maintaining and enhancing a centralised Python utility library which delivered reusable tools.
- Collaborated effectively within a globally distributed, agile team, driving progress across time zones and disciplines.
- Led end-to-end development and delivery of new product features, from scoping stakeholder needs to successful launch.
- Collaborated with stakeholders to gather requirements and architect scalable, user-centric solutions aligned with operational and business goals.
- Ensured long-term sustainability of critical software ecosystems by contributing upstream to open-source projects.
Research Software Engineer
2018 - 2021 · The Alan Turing Institute
- Improved data integrity and reduced storage overhead by building a Python library to detect and eliminate duplicate files in data packet transfers using content hashing and an optimised lightweight database.
- Supported a large-scale linguistic crowdsourcing initiative by developing a Python workflow that extracted target words from OCR processed text, retrieved contextual snippets, and generated clipped image segments from original scans to be uploaded to the crowdsourcing platform.
- Automated infrastructure as code deployment processes by implementing GitOps workflows with GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines, enhancing consistency, reliability, and traceability across environments.
- Built and automated computational infrastructure and data pipelines, performed data wrangling and analysis, and delivered insights through clear documentation, technical reports, presentations, and blog posts.
- Led the end-to-end delivery of research software projects, applying best practices in software engineering—including version control, modular design, and testing—to ensure maintainability and reproducibility.
- Collaborated closely with researchers and stakeholders across the Turing network to develop software solutions for data-intensive research aligned with Turing Challenge Areas.
- Managed projects from inception to delivery, coordinating across multidisciplinary teams to align technical implementation with research goals.
Projects
Project Maintainer and Co-Lead of Infrastructure Working Group
2018 - Present · The Turing Way
- Designed and executed strategic roadmaps for implementing and maintaining scalable infrastructure aligned with long-term project goals.
- Assessed and prioritised team activities to maximise impact and drive progress toward the group’s strategic objectives.
- Introduced and led the adoption of Agile workflows, improving transparency, accountability, and team efficiency.
- Co-led a cross-functional working group, contributing to strategic direction, operational management, and the successful onboarding of new members.
- Managed and maintained automated deployment of the book from a Git repository using reproducible computational environments and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring consistency, reliability, and version control throughout the publication process.
Maintainer
2019 - 2025 · JupyterHub and Binder
- Recognised as a Jupyter Distinguished Contributor in 2022 for significant contributions to the Jupyter ecosystem and advancing open-source initiatives.
- Operated and maintained a public cloud platform delivering reproducible, containerised computing environments for research and education at scale.
- Automated and parallelised core deployment processes using CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, reliable, and consistent platform updates.
- Served as technical lead and primary maintainer for a private BinderHub deployment at the Turing Institute, ensuring stability, scalability, and performance.
- Secured and managed a $10K infrastructure grant to support the deployment and scaling of cloud resources, including traffic sharing with mybinder.org.
- Facilitated monthly community calls, fostering collaboration, gathering feedback, and guiding technical priorities for ongoing platform development.
Independent Consultancy
Oct. 2023 - Jun. 2024 · Software Sustainability Institute/University of Edinburgh
- Designed and delivered training on software engineering best practices - focusing on version control, code readability, and FAIR principles - for a research software course.
- https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/fair-research-software
Fellow
2020 · Software Sustainability Institute
- Initiated and cultivated a community of practice focused on leveraging cloud infrastructure to enable reproducible research, fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and peer support across disciplines.
Mentor
Feb. 2021 - Jan. 2022 · OLS
- Mentored cohorts in open leadership development, guiding them in growing sustainable open science projects and fostering inclusive, collaborative communities.
Education
Astrophysics Ph.D.
2015 - 2018 · University of Leicester
Thesis: Understanding the Most Powerful Explosions in the Universe
MPhys Physics with Astrophysics
2010 - 2014 · University of Hull
Certifications
LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals
The Linux Foundation · Awarded: Aug. 20, 2024
Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals
Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement · Awarded: Nov. 14, 2022
Skills
Skill level descriptors from UK Civil Service ODP Professional Skills Framework.
Technical
Interpersonal
Communication
Publications
Journal Articles
2018. Fallback accretion on to a newborn magnetar: long GRBs with giant X-ray flares. S.L. Gibson, G.A. Wynn, B.P. Gompertz, P.T. O'Brien. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 478 (4), 4323–4335.
2017. Fallback accretion on to a newborn magnetar: short GRBs with extended emission. S.L. Gibson, G.A. Wynn, B.P. Gompertz, P.T. O'Brien. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 470 (4), 4925–4940.