Company Overview

I had the pleasure of working at Swift Solar as a Data Engineer in Spring 2021! Swift was founded in 2017 with the mission of commericializing a next generation perovskite tandem solar cell that could reach over 30% efficiency (for context, most existing solar cells reach between 15-20% efficiency).

My Work

My role there as a Data Engineer to develop the first instance of their big data automation pipeline. The solar cell development process by nature contains a lot of data: in every experiment, a certain number of variables are changed, and the output of the experiments are run through data analysis processes to characterize the results.

As the company scaled in R&D efforts, data processing speeds would slowly become a bottleneck. Everyone on the team had their own versions of spreadsheets and scripts to analyze data, and there was no centralized or unified way to communicate or aggregate findings from experiments.

As such, my work was two-fold. I developed:

• Automated python data analysis scripts
• A web-app platform to input experimental data, track samples, process + analysis test data, and provide summary reports of test results

Key Learnings

This was my first non-mechanical engineering role, so I got very familiar with python and automating the data analysis process: how to clean up the data files, pull out key variables, do math on dataframes, and save automated plots.

Through developing a web-app, I also got the chance to learn full-stack web development for the first time. I worked with a SQL database, used Django to structure the back-end and manage the data securely, and used React for the front-end to develop a user-friendly interface that focused on solving the needs of the team.

Outside of technical learnings, I was exposed to the solar cell development process, which was super cool to learn about! I saw the fundamentals of materials science & development in action, and saw the tenacity and volume of R&D experiments needed to reach success.

Team Photo