Career progression, DE&I and a positive working environment are some of the values Liberty IT Galway site lead Darren Muldoon is most passionate about.
Darren Muldoon joined Liberty IT in 2012 as a graduate engineer and now, just over a decade later, he is being entrusted to lead the company’s newly opened Galway hub in The Portershed.
The hub’s official opening was announced late last month along with Liberty IT’s plan to create 100 new jobs in the Galway area. As Liberty IT is the tech arm of Liberty Mutual Insurance, a global property and casualty insurance firm, these jobs will mostly be in software engineering and development.
A few days before the hub opened at The Portershed, Muldoon showed SiliconRepublic.com around the space and gave us an insight into what Liberty IT’s hopes are for the Galway operation and what the company can offer people who work there.
For Muldoon, career progression and stimulating work are important, as is a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). He has taken these values from his own personal experience. For starters, he knows he is a good example of someone who has been able to progress through the ranks at Liberty IT.
“I’ve worked my way through many different roles in the engineering family from software engineer to senior to principal solutions engineer and then, most recently, senior solutions engineer.” He said he was excited to bring his engineering skills to Galway and help embed Liberty IT in the city’s local tech community.
As well as the Galway hub, Liberty IT has offices in Dublin and Belfast. Muldoon said Galway students and graduates will soon be able to apply to join Liberty IT’s graduate engineering programme, which has been long established in Belfast and Dublin.
“We pride ourselves on a culture of excellent engineering and that’s really important for us across all of our operations here in Ireland,” explained Muldoon, adding that “When we’re hiring engineers, we’ll be hiring for Java, JavaScript, Python, an interest in cloud computing and also data engineering.”
But, as important as tech innovation is to Muldoon, he is equally passionate about making the Galway hub a positive environment for everyone. “I’m really pleased to be able to continue to support our employee resource groups,” he said of his plans to bring some of Liberty IT’s existing DE&I schemes to Galway. He has seen how these values impact people in his own life.
“As chair of Pride at LIT, I know first-hand the benefits of working within an organisation that really invests in DE&I initiatives.”
“It’s really important to us that our engineers will have pride in their role and will be able to embed into the Liberty IT culture which is a culture of diverse, equitable and inclusive experiences where we really encourage all of our engineers to be able to bring their whole selves to work and celebrate the individual and their ability to contribute.”
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