About Me
Sarah Gibson is a software and cloud infrastructure engineer, as well as a contributor to and advocate for open software. She holds over 6 years of experience at a research and education tech non-profit start-up, and at a national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. Sarah is passionate about working with domain experts to leverage cloud computing in order to accelerate cutting-edge, data-intensive research and disseminating the results in an open, reproducible and reusable manner.
Experience
Open Source Infrastructure Engineer
2021 - Present · 2i2c
- Deployed and managed complex systems of cloud-based architecture, including Kubernetes clusters and other cloud solutions, across AWS, Azure, and GCP
- Collaborated with stakeholders to determine system requirements and architecture in order to provide tailored user experiences from a set of product features
- Collaborated with upstream open source communities to contribute new features and maintain the health of the software ecosystem
- Scoped, developed, and launched new product features based on stakeholder user stories
- Effective team member collaborating in a globally distributed, agile team
- Responded to incidents and customer support requests as part of a highly available team
Research Software Engineer
2018 - 2021 · The Alan Turing Institute
- Collaborated with stakeholders throughout the Turing network on research projects linked to the Turing challenge areas
- Responsible for following best software practices throughout projects, implementing required computational infrastructure or automated pipelines, data wrangling and analysis, project documentation, project management, and reporting via papers, presentations or blog posts
- Notable projects: The Turing Way and Living with Machines
Projects
Co-Lead of Infrastructure Working Group
- Develop strategic plans for the implementation and maintenance of the infrastructure supporting the project
- Prioritise which activities will bring the group towards its strategic goals
- Implemented an AGILE workflow for tracking and managing activities
- Collaborate with other Co-Leads in the running of the working group and onboarding new members
Contributor
- Awarded Jupyter Distinguished Contributor in 2022
- Facilitate monthly community calls
- Operationally managing and deploying a public cloud platform facilitating reproducible computational environments for research and education
- Automated and parallelised core processes that deploy the platform using continuous deployment workflows
- Wrote a successful $10k grant to deploy and maintain cloud infrastructure at the Turing Institute to share mybinder.org’s traffic
- Technical lead and maintainer for a private Binder service at the Turing Institute
Paid Independent Consultancy
University of Edinburgh
- Developed and delivered lesson material on version control and code readability for a course on FAIR practices for research software
- https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/fair-research-software
Fellow
Software Sustainability Institute
Mentor
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
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.