Meet Luke Jones on our DevOps team! We asked Luke what it’s like to work at Bipsync, check out what he had to say…
Luke is a DevOps Engineer at Bipsync! He is involved in all manner of development projects from creating and managing the internal SaaS infrastructure and pipelines to deploying and maintaining the fleet of virtual servers used by our clients. In addition to working alongside the development team to implement and improve SDLC, he frequently collaborates with the Sales and Customer Success teams to provide documentation and support for prospects and existing clients. Luke recently celebrated his two-year anniversary at Bipsync.
Before joining the team, Luke worked for NAGRAVISION, where he gained experience as an SRE hosting multi-tenant Television-As-A-Service environments in Amazon Web Services (AWS) leveraging tools such as Ansible and Kubernetes. Luke is a computer security and forensics graduate of the University of South Wales and in his spare time, he enjoys attending gigs, hiking, and taking his car to the track!
Over the past year, Luke has participated in Bipsync-led charity fundraising activities and also completed the “Institute of Leadership and Management Level 4” – Congratulations Luke!
Check out what Luke had to say about working at Bipsync…
What’s your favorite part about working at Bipsync?
Bipsync is an up-and-coming organisation with a friendly atmosphere, a positive work culture, and incredibly dedicated and caring employees. I think that my favourite part of working at Bipsync is that we’re not afraid to try new things; whether it be to improve an existing process, to implement a fresh customer request, or to test a new feature – it can be worked into the schedule and we will persevere.
What has been your most proud moment at Bipsync (so far)?
During my time at Bipsync, I have worked on a variety of challenging and most of all interesting projects. Many of which I am proud of – such as the ongoing and ever-evolving project that is our production Jenkins configuration.
Describe what your typical day looks like at Bipsync…
As I’m sure everyone can attest, things have certainly changed a little in the last 2 years. My hour-long commute each way has been reduced to mere seconds. After a session playing with the dog and making a brew – the first steps are checking in on emails, Slack, and JIRA for support tickets. This might include checking our logging and monitoring systems for anomalies and alerts that have accumulated overnight. At 9:30 every weekday the dev team performs the ritualistic stand-up. Here we discuss yesterday’s achievements and failures; ‘publically’ discuss blockers and challenges and update the team on today’s goals. Since moving to virtual stand-ups, I’ve taken it upon myself to fiddle with zoom backgrounds whenever the opportunity presents itself. Pre-lunch work on Support tickets or continue with ongoing projects. Post-lunch continue with project stuff or meetings to discuss direction/troubleshoot et al.
What excites you the most about working in a start-up environment?
Every member of the team contributes to the success of the start-up in one way or another. There’s a fantastic and freeing feeling when things “in-anger” with new tech and making it work in a way that will improve efficiency and customer experience; regardless of if anyone outside your small team ever fully knows that it exists! I really enjoy being included in the wider conversation with sales, marketing, and customer success teams. During our weekly ‘all hands’ meetings – ongoing developments are reported and successes celebrated as a team. What excites me most about working in a start-up – when we win, we all win!
What do you think are the most important qualities of a DevOps Engineer?
As the name suggests, it takes both ‘development’ skills and ‘operational’ skills to be a DevOps engineer. However, I feel that soft skills are often overlooked and have equal if not greater importance; doubly so in a start-up. In large organisations there are often layers and layers of management who communicate, dissect, prioritize and distribute work before a task is presented to an engineer. In a small team, having the ability to communicate with both internal and external parties, understanding and evaluating a critical situation quickly and effectively is vital. Good communication skills and experience provide an engineer the tools to make critical changes when needed to ensure the resilience and reliability of customer deployments.
What would you say is the most satisfying aspect of your role?
There is no single prescribed method to solve a problem and it is possible to improve policies and automate tasks for the greater good and experience the improved quality of life after the fact. I gain the most satisfaction from my role when a release goes out without a hitch. There are so many servers, services, and processes that have to align before a full customer release can be deployed to all customers and when it eventually goes ahead – I get a little tingle of satisfaction that everything went smoothly.
How do you think your Bipsync colleagues would describe you in 3 words?
Eccentric, dedicated, pun-tastic.
Any other takeaways about working at Bipsync that you’d like to share?
I really enjoy working at Bipsync and am pleased to feel like part of this fantastic team. Having worked at Bipsync for 2 years already I’m amazed by the growth and sheer progress, even through the ever-challenging COVID period.
I look forward to seeing what the next few years hold for Bipsync — it’s an exciting time!
I think that my favourite part of working at Bipsync is that we’re not afraid to try new things; whether it be to improve an existing process, to implement a fresh customer request, or to test a new feature – it can be worked into the schedule and we will persevere.
LUKE – DEVOPS ENGINEER
Stay tuned for more from the team! If you’re interested in joining us – you can get check out our careers page for openings across our UK and US teams, and more detail on how to get in touch and apply.
