Jimisola Laursen

I’ve been fortunate to have three careers, each of them a childhood dream: elite athlete, airline pilot, and software engineer.

Track

I ran the 400m for Malmö AI and the Swedish national team. My personal bests are 45.54s outdoors, from the first round of the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton, and 45.59s indoors from the final of the 2002 European Indoor Championships in Vienna, where I took the silver medal. Both were Swedish records at the time.

Flight

After my track career I pursued another dream and became an airline pilot, training at the Lund University School of Aviation. My first airline job was flying the Boeing 737 for the Nigerian airline Arik Air; from there I flew for several European carriers, finishing as a First Officer on the Airbus A320 for the Scandinavian flag carrier SAS. A few years into my flying career I returned to the School of Aviation and completed a Bachelor of Aeronautical Science in Airline Operations.

Software

Alongside the track years I earned a Master of Science in Computer Science at Lund University, and software is where I’ve landed for good. I work as a senior AI engineer, after many years on the JVM.

Open source runs deep with me — I’ve been a Linux user since 1997, and I both build on and contribute back to open source, these days mostly in the Java and build-tooling ecosystem. I’m equally convinced about agile ways of working, and graduated as an Agile Project Leader from IHM Business School in 2023.

During my years at Luftfartsverket (LFV), Sweden’s Air Navigation Service Provider, I was deeply involved in revising ED-254, a data-exchange standard used by the aviation community — a nice way to keep a foot in both worlds.