Employee Spotlight: Meet Shanu Suman – Sales Engineering Manager

What’s your role?

I am the Manager of the Sales Engineering Team for Spire Maritime. I help our customers understand our products and services. I work closely with the maritime sales and data operations teams to provide an excellent data experience to our customers. I also work with our marketing, product and engineering teams to help develop solutions to best suit our customers’ needs.

Describe your journey to Spire. 

My first exposure to the intriguing world of space communication was as an electronics and communication engineering student, but I chose data analytics and software application development as my career path. Spire came across as a unique organization that operates at the intersection of satellites (my interest), data analytics (my skill) and global impact (my purpose). I followed Spire for a year until I found a role that was a perfect match for my skill set and what I wanted to do. I am proud of how far we have come as a team. Going public was a huge achievement, and I am amazed by all the capabilities we have developed, leveraging satellite-based data analytics to create purposeful, high-impact products. Today, I lead a diverse team spread across continents, and I’m glad to be a small part of Spire’s impressive growth story.

What Spire value do you relate to the most?

I relate to ‘Relentless’ the most. I believe in evolving through multiple iterations without giving up. I strive to give our customers an exceptional data experience.

Tell us about something you’ve learned from your colleagues at Spire. 

The workforce at Spire is truly diverse in nature. I work with colleagues and customers with different values and mindset, and there is a lot of learning in diversity. There are so many things I have learned from my colleagues in the past two years, but what strikes me the most is the problem solving culture at Spire and how we collaborate closely to resolve any issue. People are always open to brainstorming and continuously innovating.

What interests you most about space? 

Science fiction has been and still is one of my favorite genres in books and movies. Nothing is more fascinating than when you realize that many things we read as a child are not fiction anymore. Everything about space seems surreal until you actually do it, see the data, visualize it and draw inferences from it.

What inspires you most about the work you do every day? 

What inspires me most is the ability to impact the world in a meaningful way. Around 90% of global trade is done by sea, and in these challenging times, it is very crucial for all industries to not only keep track of their supply chain but also reduce their carbon emission. It is very inspiring to see how Spire’s Maritime data helps people around the world in multiple ways.