What does day-to-day life in your role look like?

Day-to-day deep diving into open source tech like airflow, kubevela, kubernetes etc is a given as an Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). Since we’re the first responders to anything that needs fixing, I get to explore and learn a bit of how the product works on a daily basis.

What would you say is the most interesting aspect of your role?

The two aspects I enjoy the most are:

• A very high degree of ownership of projects – in most companies SREs do not get to work on engineering projects and are pretty operational. In Vortexa, emphasis on having a high quality, maintainable infra helps us to reduce toil to zero.
• To not be afraid to deep dive and master open source technologies. Everyone is learning with you and often you’re going to be the one to deep dive and bring in solutions to the table.

What was your path to joining Vortexa? 

I’ve worked across Big-Tech and Startups in my career of 10+ years.

What kind of qualities does a person need to have to succeed at Vortexa?

In short, I feel the following are the go-to qualities to succeed at Vortexa:

• High ownership – you own the stuff you’re working on 100%. Everyone in the company and the world (since we use open source tech) are at your disposal to help you.
• Deep dive. Bring out your own perspective if possible.
• A focus on high quality deliverables.

What do you like about the culture? 

• All teams in Vortexa work together and don’t shy away from helping each other.
• We have this unique culture of connecting with a set of random people from the organisation and having 1-1 every week, which I love.

Who do you collaborate with?

Primarily, my UK and US counterparts in the SRE team. However, I collaborate with my dev counterparts quite often. I also help out the customer success team / solution architects with technical issues whenever required.

What are the first three things you do on a Monday morning?

• Look at pending / solved issues over the weekend
• In progress and next tasks as per my JIRA board for this week
• Who am I meeting with this week from the org

What energises you most about working as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Vortexa?

Being able to learn new technologies and explore them in depth has been a great motivator for me.