The main objective of the STMI project (Software Technologies for Modelling and Inversion), is to develop a set of software technologies for numerical simulation and solution of inversion problems. These technologies will be capable of reducing the time required for the development of simulation and inversion codes from years to days. High-level programming languages are being designed and implemented in order to enable geophysicists to use their area-specific knowledge to rapidly develop and evaluate new algorithms for imaging geologically challenging regions. We employ discretization methods in high-order finite differences and finite elements, which are optimized for seismic processing, as well as techniques of automatic differentiation for the automatic generation of the adjoint models. Another focus of the work is to achieve a higher level of automation in the spatial discretization of the domain through the generation and adaptation of meshes, which is a task that currently consumes many hours of human work. Finally, modern compiler technologies are employed to generate highly optimized code for computing platforms from supercomputers to systems in the cloud.