After living for 18 years in Beirut, Lebanon, where she was director of IT infrastructure and support at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Melissa Stockman returned to the U.S. and was looking for a new position when she saw a posting for a job with the ESnet Tools Team to develop network automation tools.

“My first thought was that it looked so interesting and was a combination of my background in machine learning and networking,” Stockman said. “I had experience in both of those areas.”

So, she applied to see what would happen. She sent her resume and was contacted the next day for a number of phone interviews, then flew out from the Princeton area for an intense day of meeting and talking with ESnet staff. It took a couple of months but she finally heard back with a job offer.

“I liked the people and was struck by how nice they are,” she said, “and the weather was so much nicer than New Jersey. I think California’s a better place for me.”

Since she joined ESnet earlier this year, she’s been developing software in two different areas, one to perform network analytics and the other to assist in network automation. Her current analytics project involves storing large amounts of router data in the cloud for later analysis. On the network automation side, she is working on a tool to check, verify and automatically update ESnet’s point-to-point router information that can become out of synch when devices are changed.  Finding and fixing such problems now has to be done manually, but Stockman’s software will do the task automatically each day.

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