Markku Nivala, Senior Engineer in Software

Markku Nivala has four years of experience from Innokas Medical’s Design Studio and from various customer projects, he appreciates the challenges and growing responsibilities given to him during this time.

I have Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Raahe University of Applied Sciences. I went to study Computer Sciences, because from the very young age I‘ve felt that this kind of profession is really my vocation profession.

I started my work career as a Trainee at Nokia in 2006. Since then I worked there as a Software Engineer to design VoIP software systems to mobile phones. After my working career at Nokia I came to work at Innokas in 2011 at first to work as a Software Engineer to develop different kinds of software systems to medical devices in our customer projects. Today my role is Senior Engineer in Software, and as a Senior Engineer I have overall responsibility of system software time management, planning, documentation, execution, and testing.

In my role, I particularly like when I’m able to work in a direct interface with the customer. I really feel that we can gain new perspectives and new knowhow from our customers through different projects, which I find very interesting. On the other hand, it’s also very rewarding to have straight impact on the success of our customer’s product development. The medical device product development process consists of many different sections, which brings challenges to project schedule planning. But fortunately, I’m able to work on projects very independently and flexibly, which helps me to face the challenges of timing. The projects I have worked in have been very diverse, and I especially like that I have to reconcile various technologies and the logic of the software we’ve developed, because I really like this kind of challenges. The software is usually developed to embedded systems, and I’ve been able to work via a very wide range of platform systems from self-made up to Linux ones. It’s also very helpful that as a Software Engineer I’m working very closely with Innokas’ Mechanical Engineers as well as Electronic Engineers, so I can get familiar with every section of the product we are developing.

I’ve liked working at Innokas very much. The enthusiastic working community, good working atmosphere and diversified job have kept me enthusiastic for several years already. It’s also very meaningful to me that we at Innokas are developing and manufacturing different kind of products that have a deep effect on the quality of people’s lives. My supervisors have encouraged me to learn new things by giving me new challenges in challenging product development projects – and this is definitely one thing that has kept me very enthusiastic towards my role at Innokas.

On my free-time I spend time with my family and I also try to find some time to do sports like badminton and biking. But I have to admit that because I really feel that the software development is vocation to me, I sometimes spend my leisure time to do some software development tasks too.