What These 4 Engineers Are Excited to Tackle in 2025

Exciting, large-scale projects can be seen as a gateway to growth in software development, enabling engineers to stretch their skills, prove their talent — and make an impact. 

This is certainly the case for Software Engineer Tyler Gibbs and his teammates at Supernova Technology, where they’re focused on integrating AI into their day-to-day workflows as a way to reduce menial and repetitive tasks. According to him, this project will improve accuracy during the code review process and give his team time to focus on more challenging aspects of their work. 

While Gibbs and his team are leaning on automation to drive greater efficiency, Senior IT Support Engineer Nicholas Mendez and his peers are doing the same at Allywn North America. He explained that, by leveraging automation technologies like BetterCloud and Jira, his team aims to proactively address potential issues before they impact the company’s users, creating a more seamless experience in the process. 

Of course, any project of such scale comes with its own set of challenges. For instance, as Senior Software Engineer Lillian Horn and her teammates at Cleo begin working on an important product update, they’ll need to find a way to add this new feature without breaking their product. But by expanding their existing REST API, she said, her team will be able to mitigate any architectural issues and add more functionality for customers. 

Every engineering project is a chance to redefine how things have been done in the past — and pave the way for a successful future. That’s what’s driving Data Engineer Zhiqun Nie and the rest of her team at EDGE as they develop an analytics data pipeline that she believes will transform the company’s approach to credit risk analysis. 

For engineers at each of these four local companies, 2025 offers the opportunity to tackle projects that combine collaboration, technical acumen and creativity. Read on to see what else Gibbs, Mendez, Horn and Nie had to say about the projects they’re most excited to work on this year and the experience they’re leaning on to do so. 

 

Supernova Technology’s end-to-end software solution is designed to automate securities-based lending.

 

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

I’m most excited to work on integrating AI into our team’s day-to-day workflows. There’s plenty of opportunities available for us to hand off some of the menial and repetitive stuff that we do to AI. One such example is doing a first glance at code reviews to point out best practices or potential bugs that a human might miss. It would be great to essentially have an extra pair of eyes doing a sanity check on everything we’re doing.

 

“I’m most excited to work on integrating AI into our team’s day-to-day workflows.”

 

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

We’ll be starting small with only a single code repository and will hopefully expand our implementation to all the code merged into our main repos. Working with each development team is going to be critical to discovering the areas where AI falls slightly short or understanding how prompt engineering will come into play in order to hit the areas it misses on a first pass. Of course, when considering AI and proprietary code, privacy is always a concern. At Supernova, we’ve built out our own private, on-premises graphics processing unit compute cluster to host large language models locally. We’ll be making use of it for privacy-sensitive AI requests.

 

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

I’ve been heavily involved in developing our AI product, Prism. I believe my experience in this area has made me highly familiar with the shortcomings and advantages of AI and where it can be used. We’ll be using this project as a benchmark for future meshing of our day-to-day workflows with AI.

 

 

Cleo aims to make it easier for organizations to connect and transact business across their entire supply chain ecosystem, offering visibility into business flows happening across partners and customers, marketplaces and internal cloud and on-premise applications.

 

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

In 2025, I am most excited to work on some of the updates we have planned for our product. Currently, almost all the configuration needs to be done though a user interface, but we are adding a feature to allow users to optionally configure our product using files they can drop in. This will allow users to easily re-create a system or spin up another instance of it. Users can also keep this configuration in version control if they want so they can easily see any updates that were made to the software. I also like that it requires us to make improvements to the software that affect customers who aren’t going to use that specific feature. Some customers exclusively use our REST API to configure parts of our application, and we are expanding it to support this endeavor so they will be able to configure even more without having to touch a single button.

 

“We are adding a feature to allow users to optionally configure our product using files they can drop in.”

 

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

This project takes a lot of work and is an ongoing goal for us throughout 2025. We are hoping to have a beta version out by the third quarter of this year and a full release by the end of the year. We are breaking the work down into manageable chunks so we can make steady progress on it throughout the year while continuing to update and add existing features to all of our product lines.

The biggest challenge that we face is the fact that when our product was originally architected, it was not designed to support this at all. We need to figure out a way to add this new feature without breaking the product or re-writing everything. One way we are overcoming that is by expanding our existing REST API. Currently, not everything can be configured through it, but we can add new endpoints and features to it. By leveraging and improving this existing resource, we can get around a lot of those architecture issues and add more functionality for the customers since they can use the REST API when they make updates themselves. I’m working with five other very talented engineers on this project, a few of whom are extremely knowledgeable about the product and a couple who just started working on it.

 

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

In college, I gained experience looking through existing code I had never seen before and learning how to figure out what it was doing and how best to update it. I have also done extensive work with this product, notably the REST API. But the thing that prepared me the most was being willing to learn, knowing how to work with other people and being confident asking questions — and for help. It is impossible for me to know everything about how our product works. I know certain parts very well while my coworkers know other parts very well, and being able to admit when I don’t know something helps us all make a better product in the end.

 

 

EDGE, a NinjaHoldings brand, offers a platform that measures consumer credit risk by leveraging data related to income, spending and balance history. 

 

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

As a staff data engineer at EDGE, I’m constantly inspired by the transformative power of data in shaping the future of credit risk analysis. In 2025, we’re embarking on one of our most ambitious and exciting projects: building a next-generation analytics data pipeline that will revolutionize how we process, analyze and leverage consumer banking data to deliver cutting-edge credit features and scores.

At the heart of this project is the creation of a centralized data lake that seamlessly integrates vendor data from diverse sources. This data lake will serve as the foundation for advanced analytics, enabling us to derive deeper insights into consumer behavior, income patterns, loan detection and financial trends — all powered by bank transaction data. By consolidating and standardizing data from multiple vendors, we’ll be able to enhance income detection, improve loan detection, uncover financial trends and automate credit scoring. This project isn’t just about storing data — it’s about unlocking its potential to make credit risk analysis faster, smarter and more inclusive.

 

“This project isn’t just about storing data — it’s about unlocking its potential to make credit risk analysis faster, smarter and more inclusive.”

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

With a master’s degree in both finance and computer science, I bring a unique blend of technical expertise and financial domain knowledge. Professionally, I’ve honed my skills in data processing, transformation and quality assurance through roles at a digital mapping and navigation company, where I worked with large-scale location data. This experience taught me how to design scalable data pipelines, ensure data accuracy and handle high-volume, high-velocity data sets.

Additionally, my time at a customer relationship management company reinforced the importance of being client-oriented when developing software and data tools. I learned to prioritize user needs, deliver intuitive solutions and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams to drive business value. My background in testing and quality assurance further ensures that I approach every project with a focus on reliability, scalability and performance. This project offers a wealth of learning opportunities including: building scalable data infrastructure; data integration and harmonization; advanced analytics and machine learning; data governance and compliance; real-time data processing and APIs; and leadership and project management.

 

 

Allwyn North America operates lotteries across North America, providing technology, services, content and playbooks to help lotteries grow their player base and increase revenue. 

 

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

I’m most excited to continue expanding our automation capabilities across the organization. By leveraging existing technologies like BetterCloud and Jira, we can proactively address potential issues before they impact our users to ensure a seamless experience for everyone. This frees up valuable time for both our IT team and end users, allowing us to focus on improvements and innovation rather than troubleshooting. I’m particularly drawn to projects that allow me to delve into deeper technical challenges and develop creative solutions that benefit our teams and the entire organization.

 

“I’m most excited to continue expanding our automation capabilities across the organization.”

 

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

Collaboration is crucial throughout this process. I envision working closely with IT colleagues, department heads and end users to ensure the project meets everyone’s needs. A key element will be working to get stakeholders in the same room to identify pain points, gather requirements and define clear objectives. To illustrate this collaborative approach, our recent office move involved communicating with multiple stakeholders, organizing our project timeline, getting buy-in and then executing the plan with multiple teams, including our marketing department, to accomplish our team goals.

Potential challenges could include resistance to change, integration complexities and  unforeseen technical hurdles. We also need to ensure we have stakeholder buy-in throughout the process. To overcome these, I’ll prioritize clear communication, proactive planning and a flexible approach that allows for adjustments along the way.

 

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

My experience in automating IT processes, particularly over the past 10+ years working with Jamf, has provided me with a strong foundation to excel in this project. Developing and implementing automated workflows within Jamf has honed my ability to  identify areas for improvement, streamline processes and maximize efficiency. These skills are highly transferable to other automation platforms like BetterCloud, allowing me to quickly adapt and contribute to new initiatives.

Furthermore, my commitment to professional development is evident in my Jamf certifications, which go up to the administrative level, and my ongoing pursuit of further knowledge through classes focused on advanced BetterCloud functionalities. Looking ahead, I’m eager to deepen my expertise in user provisioning, both onboarding and offboarding. I believe this project offers a unique opportunity to expand my skill set and contribute to the organization’s ongoing automation efforts.