When software works well, most of the engineering disappears. A user sees a chart, an interface, a workflow, or an answer. They do not see the build process, the backend systems, the data flows, the architectural choices, the dependencies that had to be removed, or the decisions that make the product reliable over time.
For International Women in Engineering Day, we spoke to three women in Natcap’s engineering team — Ida Rolek-Kononiuk, Laura Roll and Emily Selwood — about how they came into engineering, what they enjoy about the work, and what it has meant to build a career in the field.
Their roles touch different parts of Natcap’s product and platform. Laura works on the front-end experience: the part of the product users see and interact with. Emily works on what she describes as the “glue” in the middle: the backend systems that sit between the data Natcap generates and the visual outputs users rely on. Ida, as Chief Technology Officer, looks across the full engineering lifecycle, from architecture and deployment to reliability and long-term technical direction.
Different roles, but a similar thread: all three were drawn to technology early by wanting to understand how things worked.
For Laura, it started with watching her dad repair computers, surrounded by fans, hard drives and bits of machines. Alongside that, she was interested in art and design, and those two interests eventually met through building MySpace pages and websites, then through a move from design into development.
Ida’s interest began young too. She started coding as a child, in a family where maths, chess and technology were encouraged. Her career has taken her from hands-on software engineering into leadership, architecture and technology strategy, but the underlying appeal has stayed consistent: solving something complicated in a way that works cleanly.
Emily also grew up around computers early enough that code was simply how you made the machine do anything useful. Over her career, she has worked across command-line tools, web development, data processing and visualisation, often in the parts of the system that prepare data, tools and infrastructure so other people can use them.
That is one of the clearest themes across our conversations: engineering is about understanding what needs to work better, and for whom.
Laura describes the work as a puzzle. Requirements change, plans shift, unexpected issues appear, and part of the satisfaction comes from navigating those hurdles with a team and eventually getting a feature over the line. Ida talks about the pleasure of solving a difficult problem elegantly — bringing many hidden layers together so that, from the user’s perspective, “Someone clicks a button and they say, ‘Oh, it’s so easy, it works.’” Emily puts the reward in more direct terms: the best moment is knowing you have solved a problem for someone and made their life easier.
At Natcap, that can mean very different kinds of work. Emily points to improvements she made to the build process, work no user would ever see, but which saved significant time for the engineering team. Laura talks about removing a dependency on a third party platform, moving away from a workaround that had become limiting and giving Natcap more control over its own code. Ida highlights Natcap’s approach to AI adoption: using new tools where they genuinely help, without applying them indiscriminately or ignoring the risks.
As AI changes what it means to be a software engineer, that instinct will only become more important. The same curiosity that drew Ida, Laura and Emily into technology — asking how something works, what problem it solves, and how it could work better — is what prepares engineers for the next phase of the field.
For many women in engineering, there has also been another kind of work running in parallel: learning how to navigate rooms where they are underrepresented. That can mean having to earn trust more slowly, adapting how you present yourself in order to be heard, or carrying the awareness that you are the only woman in the room.
But that picture is changing. Engineering today is not where it was a generation ago, and a lot of progress has already been made. Outdated stereotypes about who belongs in technical roles still exist, but Ida, Laura and Emily’s experiences are evidence that women can enter these fields, grow, lead and thrive in them. As Ida puts it, women entering engineering should feel that “their brains, their abilities, what they bring with themselves should be enough in every room.”