Intergironaut Story: Hanna

“It’s really inspirational if I know clients will be happy and that our product works without any errors or mistakes”

DevOps engineer Hanna enjoys working within a close-knit team and ensuring that everything at Intergiro works correctly and securely. 

How long have you been at Intergiro?

Less than half a year. You know, I’ve never worked in a place like this before, with a multinational team and very interesting challenges, including technologies that are all new for me. I think I provide a lot of support to our developers and our engineers, so even though I haven’t worked here for a long time yet, I feel like I already did something important.   

Could you share a little about your background? 

I have seven years of experience. I’ve worked in various areas, including game dev and streaming channels, but I always heard that fintech is something very interesting and worth trying out. 

I was the senior DevOps engineer at my last job, but I decided to move to another company because it was time for a change. And so I started interviewing. Out of so many interviews, the interview with Intergiro was just the best fit. We discussed so many things! It was all without any pressure, it was just so easy to speak and describe my experience to my future colleagues. Right after my interview, subconsciously, I knew I had to join this company. And finally, yep, I chose Intergiro. And I know the colleagues who interviewed me were happy because they liked me right from the start. 

My experience is that if at the interview stage it’s easy to ask questions and speak with your interviewers, it’ll be easy to work with these people on the job. And so I can recommend the interview process at Intergiro. Just start!  

Can you tell me what it is that you do? 

As a DevOps engineer, your main aim is that everything should work correctly. Fundamentally, all things should work correctly, perfectly, and securely. Thus, I do a lot of different things. Sometimes I help developers to debug and find problems. I’m always creating, I’m supporting. I also work with infrastructure. Right now we have a very big task: to move all our infrastructure into code. It’s best practice to have infrastructure as code, so this is one of my main tasks. 

Additionally, my team develops pipelines in Github and Gitlab and prepares them for developers to run tests and security checks. We’re preparing some tasks for data engineers to run and work with data. We support and work with databases. 

Another task is that we will start on-call duties, although we’re only at the beginning of implementation. This means we need to prepare documentation, what to do in case of problems, who will do it, how it will be done. 

Basically, I’m doing a lot of different tasks. I think this only describes 20% of my job!  

What’s your favourite thing about all these things you do?

My favourite thing is that I can create something that works correctly from chaos. I can put it this way: a DevOps engineer should be the person that creates something really great from many different parts and coding and applications. I aim to create something that will work and that other people will use, and that will help everyone, including clients and other developers. 

I also enjoy the part where we have something strange to work with, like a new application that no one understands, and in the end you have documentation, monitoring, everything. When I see the result it’s always an amazing feeling. I feel like an artist!  

What does an average day at work look like for you?

Every day I open my laptop and I check my tasks. I always check if someone has asked for help on our special Slack channel, that’s my first task. And if no one has asked anything, then I'm going to continue to work with my usual tasks. I’ll check Jira and ask questions regarding what I need or what we’re planning to do, or discuss some technical details. 

Now that we have a new employee on our team, we also discuss what they need to do and check what I can help them with, and then I just continue. I finish each task and check with the engineering team, then I’ll close it and move on to another task. 

How does communication work within a remote team? 

I’ve worked remotely since the beginning of my career here, so it's not a problem. I usually can write to ask something of somebody, to prepare, to discuss something. I also set up meetings or even quick calls (‘huddles’) on Slack. It’s easy. My colleagues always help me, even if sometimes they are so busy. I think the communication is great here, even though I’ve never met anybody in person. But hopefully in the future I get to meet them in real life.  

What have been your favourite aspects of working for Intergiro?

That’s difficult, since I really like a lot of things here at Intergiro. But I can talk about a recent task: when we migrated from Gitlab to Github. It was an interesting experience for me since I always wanted to know how it works because Github is really popular. At Intergiro we only use popular tools, not legacy tools. Working on this migration was a very interesting experience and I enjoyed it very much. 

How has your career developed since joining Intergiro? 

The main thing that has changed for me is that previously I worked with AWS, and now I work with Google Cloud. I am already involved with many different tasks related to this service, and I’m planning to pass certifications. My colleagues have supported me by recommending what to study and providing materials and advice to prepare for the certification. I think that’s been the biggest change in my career. 

What motivates you to keep up the good work here?

One thing is I read a lot about our products. Something unique here is that usually DevOps engineers are quite far away from the systems and tools. We support them, but don’t use them ourselves. However, I actually use them. We asked the support team to grant us credentials in order to use them and check how it all works, which I’ve really enjoyed. It’s got a very cool UI and very interesting features, and I’m happy that I now better understand when our clients see some errors. For me it’s really inspirational if I know clients will be happy and that the product will work without any errors or mistakes. 

The support we provide on the team is also very motivating. When you support your developers in fixing things quickly, and they’re happy, you can create great things together. When I ask developers to help me, they always do, if not at that moment then later that same week. I like that we create very modern projects and a very modern product to use. 

Finally, I really like the spirit of the team. More than just colleagues, we’re all very close to each other. The other team members have helped me so much with aspects outside of work. You know, I immigrated to Poland after starting my job here at Intergiro, and my colleagues helped me find a vet to be able to move my dog here with me. I really want to emphasise this because it’s great, and it’s not in every company that people help one another. Even though here we’re a remote-first company, we are very close.