Sebastian Sundqvist: from writing code to shaping how customers solve problems 

Sebastian Sundqvist joined Etteplan in early 2021 as a Senior Software Engineer. Today he’s a Senior Consultant in Data & AI, splitting his time between two teams: Advisory Services, and a software team he works closely with. 

“In advisory services, we have a lot of really skilled people, but in pretty different areas. We have quite a broad skill set there,” he says. “The software team is different; there we all work closely together on the same kinds of problems.”

Sebastian’s career at Etteplan progressed faster than he expected. He put his name forward for a team manager position and held that role for about four years before moving into his current role on the advisory team.

One project Sebastian is especially proud of involved one of the largest defence contractors in the US.

The customer needed to run ground testing on aircraft using a newer technology: fiber strips that detect how much an aircraft bends by measuring how light bends inside the fiber, instead of traditional sensors. The approach could generate hundreds of thousands, even millions, of measurement points, far more than the customer’s systems could process in anything close to real time.

“We came in with a small team and worked on it for about two years,” he says. “The customer went from a system that didn’t work at all to one that really worked in real time. They told us it would save them two and a half years of testing time. The requirement was one second, and we got it down to around three hundred milliseconds, three times faster than what they asked for.”

What Sebastian says shaped him most at Etteplan wasn’t a single project, though. Early in his career as a developer, a ticket was a ticket, he did what he was asked without asking why. Moving into team management, and later into early customer discussions as a senior consultant, changed that.

“I try to be willing to challenge the customer, not to tell them they’re wrong, but to say: I understand the problem you’re trying to solve, and I think we can solve it in a better way,” he says. It’s a distinction customers notice, he says, and one he’s still learning from.

Sebastian describes his own rhythm as something his managers have learned to work with rather than override. He’s fine putting his head down and grinding through a demanding stretch, but he needs real recovery afterward, and he says his managers have consistently given him that space once a project cools down.

Much of his work involves US-based customers, which sometimes means working late.

“There’s never been an expectation that I’d show up early in the morning if I had a meeting until ten the night before,” he says. “The flexibility has always been good, both in how I work and when.”

Sebastian has watched his own day-to-day shift from writing code himself to designing and reviewing work that AI agents increasingly handle.

He sees three broad camps forming around where this goes: companies trying to run entirely on AI agents with no real human oversight, which he thinks works for small or trivial products but not much beyond that; the view he holds himself, that AI becomes a tool woven into how people work without removing people from the loop, similar to the shift from typewriters to computers; and a smaller group who think AI is a passing phase that will fade once its costs catch up with it, a view he doesn’t share.

“AI will undoubtedly be a part of the future, but it won’t be the only future,” he says.

Outside work, Sebastian picked golf back up this year after a 25-year break, and cooks often, in a style he jokingly calls American Italian: more flair, more cheese than classical Italian cooking.

Asked what kind of person fits well at Etteplan, he points to people who like change rather than settling into one thing. “There’s a lot of internal mobility here, not just upward, but sideways too. If you like new challenges and aren’t afraid to change direction, I think you’d feel right at home here,” he says.