Looking for a summer job or internship in Brussels?
Post by Ashley Argüello, Social Media Strategist and
Diane Müller, CHRO at Railnova
May 11, 2022
If you’re a student and live in Brussels, why not take part in Railnova’s summer internship programme?
How a summer job started it all for Geoffrey
Two years ago, these were Geoffrey Bultot’s exact thoughts. “Why not?”. His close friend Sacha called him up and told him about Railnova. They spoke about Sacha’s great experience within the company. During the call, Sacha happened to mention that his team was looking for students and asked Geoffrey if he wanted to apply.
That is the story of how Geoffrey came aboard the Railnova train to work on Return Merchandise Authorization during the summer as an intern.
“I made some blunders at the beginning. That’s normal when you are a newbie. I learned a lot technically and on a human level”.
The summer internship turned into a 12-month adventure. As this internship was coming to an end, Geoffrey asked around. He wanted to work more with remote sensors and wanted to stay at Railnova.
Ask, and you will receive. Geoffrey came back as an intern during his last school semester.
He will finish his master’s degree this summer and will come on board full time after the summer break. He will join the Hardware team as Electronic Embedded Software Engineer and will continue working on his passions.
Looking back, Geoffrey recognizes his decision to intern at Railnova as a turning point. That decision opened doors he never knew existed before.
So what will you be doing this summer?
Curious about the openings for this summer’s internships? Here’s the list:
[ALTIUM] Work on different tasks to improve the way with work with it, and search alternatives for all the components we have on the PCBA’s we manufacture now, to ease the Supply Chain.
Duration: 1 month
Requirements:
Electronics engineer with a beginner experience in routing (Nice to have: already worked with Altium) and a good knowledge of the characteristics of the important components (MOSFETS, capacitors, isolators, IO extender, …).
Responsibilities:
In the context of hard component supplies, search for alternative components for all the ones we use in our design with similar enough electrical characteristics.
Help us on many small improvements related to Altium to help us be more efficient.
Integrate Wifi HaLow technology into our Railster
Duration: minimum 3 months (internship)
Requirements: Electronics Engineer
Responsibilities:
When integrating our Railster on trains and locomotives, our Engineers connect to various types of equipment, often in different train zones. Identifying connection points, cable routing path, and specifying intermediate connectors, cable manufacturing procedure and installation procedure represent a large portion of the project, associated material costs, and delays as finding a viable cable path can be tricky.
Various wireless technologies have been on the market for quite some time, but only now a technology that mixes long-range (critical in train/locomotive environment with lots of enclosed metallic spaces) and high (>1Mbps) throughput is available: Wifi HaLow.
During this internship, you will be responsible for integrating a Wifi HaLow module inside our Railster and designing a simple HaLow-enabled device capable of measuring analogue voltages.
Porting Qualcomm MDM9207 SoC to Mainline Linux Kernel
Duration: 2 months+
Requirements: Basic Linux knowledge
Responsibilities:
Railnova is designing a new product based on a highly-integrated 4G modem SoC, the Qualcomm MDM9207. This SoC integrates a radio DSP and a general-purpose 1.2GHz CPU capable of running Linux OS.
This modem has a working 3.18 Linux Kernel port which has been outdated since 2017.
During this internship, you will be responsible for porting the MDM9207 platform to a recent Linux Kernel, and submitting the port to be integrated into the mainline Linux Kernel.
You deep dive into the Linux Kernel, device tree, its configuration and build system.
Documentation clean-up and harmonisation
Duration: To be discussed.
Type: Summer job
Requirements:
- Used to Github
- Used to Markdown
- Structured
- Methodical
- Organized
- Rigorous
Responsibilities:
Installation procedure documentation, schematics, and other documents clean-up. Definition of specific templates, and move to the new generic doc template format with the new numbering system.
Documentation and tools
Duration: 3 weeks (summer job)
Requirements: Student in Electrical/Electromechanical/Mechatronic engineering
Responsibilities:
Inventory of all the cabling kits per asset classes and variants. Creation of data request for each cabling kit to check if the cabling kit matches new locos from different customers.
Integration study of Railster UG2/2U inside trains
Duration: 4 months (internship)
Requirements: Master student in Electrical/Electronic/Electromechanical/Mechatronic engineering
Responsibilities:
You will join the Train interface engineering team responsible for the electrical and mechanical integration of the Railster inside the assets, from the electrical analysis of the potential connection points to the production of the cabling kits that will be physically installed.
In that context, you will take part of Railster integration study projects with the goal of having the Railster UG2/2U safely installed and connected to the asset busses. You will work on the design of a cabling kit with cables and connectors solutions to integrate the Railster to new types of locomotives or on the feasibility study of upgrading the existing cabling kit using Railster UG1/Railster UG2 to Railster UG2U, which is another version of the Railster UG2 recently designed.
Example of tasks you will do:
- Analysing the train electrical schematics to identify connection points on the train.
- Designing cabling schematics and easy-to-assemble connectors for field busses (MVB, Can Bus, J1708, RS484, Ethernet, RS232, Ethernet, …) and sensors (battery, level sensors, temperature sensors, vibration sensors…)
- Participating in the design of mechanical installation in the train.
- Writing up simple and pragmatic installation instructions so that our Clients can easily install the Railster and the cable kit themselves.
- Produce cabling kits.
You will be responsible for the end-to-end implementation of your project, communication, escalation of issues and decision making at your level.
Project: Production and industrialisation of cabling kits
Duration: To be agreed
Type: Summer job
Requirements: Bachelor student in Electrical/Electronic/Electromechanical/Mechatronic
Responsibilities:
You will be part of the team working on the production of cabling kits, on quality check, on documentation or on test benches.
Railster Configuration generator
Duration: 3-6 weeks
Requirements: Python programming – Django application
Responsibilities:
- Create django application to generate various json configuration based on user inputs,
- Create abstraction layers based on the current configuration database
Railster Embedded rules editor
Duration: 3-6 weeks
Responsibilities:
- Lua editor
- Diff versioning
- Validation
- Auto completion
Data science / Business Intelligence intern or student
Duration: 1-3 months
Requirements: Python programming language + the pandas data science library and/or SQL knowledge
Responsibilities: Railnova is selling data science/business intelligence reports to its clients and would like to improve some of them. The report building mechanism is fully automated and relies heavily on SQL and the python data stack (pandas). Data querying is particularly challenging because of the high volume of data (10TB+). The responsibilities will be to modify some data science reports, add new reports and work on performance. Reports example: fuel consumption analysis, energy consumption reports (from and back to the network), fleet utilisation and possible optimisation.
Django admin theme migration
Duration: 2-3 months
Type: intern or student job
Requirements: Python programming language and django or willingness to learn django, fluent in stackoverlfow 🙂
Responsibilities: We have client accessible administration to our website (3000+ users). We have used, successfully until now, an external theme for our application (django-suits). However, our application has to stay up to date (django3 and django4), and the development of our theme has not been following the latest development of the django framework, so we are looking for a replacement. The first step would to remove the custom theme that we have to have a clean slate, and the second step would be to either find a new existing theme or to code a minimalistic one that matches the requirements that we have.
Testing automation, scenario, and codebase auditing.
Duration: 1-3 months
Requirements: Python and Javascript programming languages, fluent in Stackoverflow.
Responsibilities: Railnova has matured as a 10+ years old scale up with more than 5 developers working full time on its main SaaS products. The codebase has become significant in size, and help is needed to automatise manual testing done by Product Managers and developers, as well as auditing the code base for performance (running audit tools and implementing or making suggestions).
Locomotive matching with maps.
Project: At Railnova, one of the most critical data that we get from a locomotive is its position, coming mainly from a GNSS system (as GPS). Matching the GNSS position with the Railway map will improve the precision of the locomotive position and, consequently, data that depend on it (for example, km counters, which have a critical role in maintenance planning). The matching can be challenging in some dense areas of the Railway, like near in yard areas, so advanced methods will need to be tested.
Duration: 2 to 3 months
Requirements: good skills in Python
Responsibilities: Develop an algorithm that performs the matching, test its performance (accuracy and timing), and deploy the algorithm in production (if the performances allow it and time remaining)
Automated optical inspection (AOI) to improve Railnova’s electronic production quality.
Project: The operator currently performs quality control of the electronics produced at Railnova, which is a time-consuming and tedious task. The goal of this project would be to develop an algorithm that would detect the most impacting anomalies from pictures of the boards and deliver the result in a straightforward way to the person in charge of the production process.
Duration: 3 to 4 months
Requirement: good skills in Python
Responsibility: Development and training of an algorithm that detects the anomalies on the board pictures, develop a tool with a simple UI that provides the anomaly detected and allows to give feedback to the algorithm.
Mining of data configuration of Railnova’s IoT devices
Project: Railnova installs IoT boxes in the train (aka Railster) that collect data and send them in real-time to our infrastructure. The type and amount of data that a Railster collects depends on the type of locomotive or train on which it is installed and from a client use case. Today more than 1500 Railsters are collecting data worldwide for numerous clients and locomotive classes, which gives a high number of possible configurations (sometimes more than 100 for a single client and locomotive type!). This project aims to explore, categorize, and sort all these possible configurations using some state of art ML algorithms. This classification would have a lot of useful by-products, for example: better prediction of the data impact of a given configuration, detection of anomalies, etc.
Duration: 1 to 2 months
Requirement: good skills in Python
Responsibility: Build features that will allow to correctly classify a given configuration, make a model allowing to predict the data impact of a given configuration, and develop a tool allowing to browse through the configurations.
UX with UI Design skills intern or student
Duration: 1 to 3 months
Requirements: Cognitive psychology theories, Usability principles, Conceptual Design (from flows/wireframes to detailed UI Design)
Responsibilities: Railnova is providing web-software solutions to help its customers to retrieve and display, in a structured and human-readable way, a large amount of data and derivate value from it. The responsibilities will be:
- To think about specific user needs and/or problematics
- Translate the needs into actionable insights and design goals
- Turning those insights into designs (from high-level concepts to detailed UI Design)
Contribute to Infrastructure State of the Art implementation in Systems, Network, Log and Metrics matters
Duration: 2 to 4 months
Requirements: Linux, Python
Responsibilities:
You’ll be part of the infrastructure team managing the systems and networks underlying the whole business at Railnova. We are working with Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, etc, and we are looking for 2 students that are willing to improve the quality of the infrastructure at Railnova.
Create a Manufacturing Resources Planning module for a Django-based (Python, Database, Django)
Project: The Supply Chain Team is responsible for the supply of raw materials, planning of (in-house) production, and delivery to our customers in a timely manner.
Railnova’s products are very complex, with hundreds of parts to be purchased on a regular basis. This work is made even more complex as lots of Electronic parts are hard to source or have extremely long lead times. It is thus crucial to have proper visibility on what needs to be purchased and to identify blocking parts as quickly as possible to avoid stopping the production.
The current tools (excel sheets and todos) are too limited to do proper planning of the purchasing, so we started the development of a small MRP.
The goal of this internship is to improve and integrate this MRP into our in-house, Django-based ERP, SupplyX.
Duration: 2-3months
Requirements:
During this internship, your will need to push your analytical skills to model the interactions/dependencies / intricacies/interdependencies of purchase, stock, manufacturing, and shipping events using the Django framework, write an algorithm to solve them, and see your work being deployed and used as an everyday tool of the SupplyChain Team.
Responsibilities:
Supply Chain for business logic, Hardware to take over the initial proof of concept developed, and Christian for technical guidance.
Be part of the supply chain team and discover what is usually hidden inside a company. The supply chain is overall responsible for purchasing, planning, provisioning, internal and external logistics and support the production team. Amongst other things, you will:
- Execute incoming material control.
- Pick in stock the requirements for the production of cable kits and railsters.
- Maintain and improve a stock organization and enforce stock cleanliness.
- Register stock moves in IT systems and physically move pieces to the required area.
- Order consumables when the stock is low to avoid shortages.
- Perform inventory control
- Ship orders and RMA Returns to our customers
- Maintain documentation
Duration: 3 months – it can be part-time or full
Start: June – Low priority and to be discussed based on the workload
Requirements:
- Organized
- Rigourous
- Methodical
- Google Suite (Sheets)
- English reading and writing
Responsibilities:
- Overall responsibility is to execute the operational tasks described above in the project description.
Content creation – proofreading and copywriting
Project: As we aim to increase our Digital Marketing activities, we are looking for support to create content for the different Marketing campaigns.
More specifically, we aim to increase our blog activities and newsletters by providing meaningful content to our leads, customers, and future colleagues and are looking to hire a student helping copywriting and proofreading.
Duration: minimum 4-6 months, if it works, it can be even longer
Requirements:
- Very good English skills
- Copywriting abilities
- Proactive asking
- Fast iteration
Responsibilities: proofreading and copywriting blog posts and newsletter content.
Refactoring our legal SAAS conditions and moving to general terms of uses
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