The Double-Edged Dynamo: Sergei Häyrynen, COO & Data Engineer

“I have been fascinated by human biology and mathematics since the earliest conscious years of my life. I read and memorized all the vividly illustrated children's books on human anatomy available at the library. Together with my mother, we went through the abstract concepts of infinite lines and zero-dimensional points."

“My personal discovery of computers during school years got me to first seek a field of science and later a business domain where programming, mathematics and natural sciences can be combined - I ended up studying signal processing and systems biology at Tampere University of Technology.”

Sergei's background in bioinformatics has been particularly useful in the healthcare field. An understanding of healthcare vocabularies and standards, with the ability to communicate in the client's language are essential.

“I started my career jumping straight into cancer genomics and computational biology in Matti Nykter's research group and later as a consultant in his spin-off. Later I have done, for example, consulting for international research groups and medical companies, both in expert positions and in developing the operations of expert teams. Academia is still close to my heart and I participate in my friends' academic research projects on my free time.”

Timo and Sergei founded Veracell in 2017. Currently, we have more than 20 experts working on different projects and internal product development. In 2021, Veracell's turnover was €1.3M, an 83% increase from the previous year.

“I have always been vocal with my opinions and views and wanted to influence if not the world, then at least the things I myself do. In Timo I met a like-minded founder ready to start a new business. Founding, running and especially building a company has brought a previously sidelined human factor to data-oriented work and helped me to grow as a person.”

Sergei is involved in Tietoevry's teams with a significant contribution as an expert in analytics and data processing. Healthcare projects aim, among other things, to predict rare diseases and automate the time-consuming manual processes of doctors.

"At Veracell I actively participate in customer projects, mostly as a data and cloud engineer. I have a strong knowledge of healthcare and genomics, which has helped enormously in the healthcare field. Recently, I have been involved in building Azure Cloud -based data platforms both from scratch and as part of highly experienced teams. The projects have brought me years of experience in building scalable and reliable integration and ETL pipelines. I've worked a lot with Scala and Spark, enabling analytics and AI development with real-world big data.”

"As a worker, I am hard-working and take care of things regardless of the time of day. I see clearly what is essential and I am generally efficient and focused. In customer projects, I keep the technical teams up and running by understanding many different aspects and helping people navigate the projects. If necessary, I take on any new thing and learn to do it well."

In recent months, Sergei has taken on a wider role in the operational management of the company.

"I have participated in the development of my own company in almost all possible roles. As the operational manager, I keep the company not only running but also accelerating. As in client projects, I try to extract real objectives and meaningful end-points to measure achievements."

From the technical side, Sergei's toolkit includes Python, Scala, R, to a lesser extent C++, as well as Javascript, Typescript and React. Azure has been his daily work environment for several years. He uses Databricks and Spark to process large amounts of data, and traditional SQL databases (MS SQL, PostgreSQL) and Elasticsearch are also handled with ease.