Read all about Elre’s journey here.
You started your journey in academia with a PhD at Cambridge—what originally drew you to that path, and what did you enjoy most about it?
I’d always been drawn to the idea of doing a PhD. My dad is an engineer, and growing up our vacations often involved tours of wind turbines or hydroelectric power stations, and once even a trip to the South African Large Telescope. Doing science and being able to contribute to humanity’s understanding of the world always seemed like an exciting and worthwhile pursuit.
What I valued most about my PhD was the sense of camaraderie in working alongside other curious, motivated people. That shared enthusiasm made a real difference, whether it was waking up to a message from a collaborator sent when inspiration struck them at midnight or just nerding out over lunch. I found a similar sense of shared purpose outside the lab when I learned to row at Churchill College. Being part of a team that was equally committed and supportive, was grounding – and I’ve stayed connected to rowing one way or another ever since.
What prompted your decision to transition from academia into a customer-facing engineering role, and how did you navigate that shift?
By the end of my PhD, I was quite burnt out, and I knew I needed a change. I’d spent a long time working on slow, incremental progress, and I realized that I needed an environment with faster feedback cycles, where I could solve real problems for real people.
I was drawn toward a customer‑facing engineering role because I love explaining ideas and find motivation in helping others with their work. I had always loved the teaching and supervising aspects of my postgraduate studies, so this felt familiar and played to my strengths.
The transition itself was a bit unplanned. I was at a rowing‑related event when I struck up a conversation with one of the coaches, who happened to be a MathWorker. He encouraged me to visit the MathWorks office and introduced me to some of the teams, and when a role later became available, I applied. It turned out to be a great fit, combining deep technical work with collaboration, communication, and much shorter feedback cycles. And all the while, I’m still surrounded by curious, motivated people.
For those unfamiliar with the role, what does a Senior Customer Facing Engineer at MathWorks actually do day-to-day?
Most days definitely involve writing code. That might mean building prototypes for new customers, helping existing customers modernise legacy codebases, creating user‑friendly front‑ends to share with less technical users, or even implementing ideas directly from research papers (these are my favourite!). I enjoy a fair bit of freedom to choose projects I like and to solve them in interesting ways.
Alongside that, I spend time talking to customers: presenting workshops, delivering webinars, or just in conversation to better understand their workflows and make thoughtful technical recommendations. I support users across Europe, so I also travel to visit them sometimes, which is a nice perk.
What have been the most surprising or rewarding aspects of working in a customer-facing technical role?
The most rewarding part of my job is hearing back from users when something I’ve built or shared genuinely improves their work. Sometimes it’s a small tool that saves them a significant amount of time; other times it’s simply pointing them to a feature that already exists and turns out to solve their problem exactly.
Looking back, were there any challenges or self-doubts during your transition, and how did you overcome them?
I think it’s common to face self-doubt when making a big change, especially at the end of something as all-consuming as a PhD. I’d spent years becoming a world expert in a very niche, specialised topic and I worried about moving to an industry role where I’d need to solve a wide range of very different problems.
But it turns out that I love this variety! I found that I thrive when working under constraints. In academia, you can spend months trying to solve a problem without knowing whether a solution even exists. In industry, timelines are shorter, which forces you to think more pragmatically: where can I simplify, what assumptions are reasonable, and how can I reformulate this general problem for my specific situation? All questions that you might ask during a PhD as well, but on a shorter feedback cycle.
What advice would you give to women in academia or early in their tech careers who are considering a similar move into industry?
If you’re thinking about making a change, I think there’s real value in trying things out. Tech and computer science are relatively rare in that it’s often possible to move between academia and industry without much friction, rather than feeling locked into a single path.
What helped me most was talking to people – across academia and industry, in roles I thought I wanted, roles I didn’t yet know were interesting, and even in settings that weren’t job‑related at all. Don’t underestimate the value of chance conversations.
