Gabriel is a DevOps Engineer, based in London, responsible for the reliability of Vortexa’s infrastructure, as well as creating and managing tools for our developers.

Prior to joining Vortexa, Gabriel worked as a Software and then DevOps engineer at BT.

Fun fact: Gabriel made excellent use of his time during lock-down and taught himself how to backflip this year!

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

It’s so hard to describe what day-to-day life in my role looks like because every day is always different. There is always a new challenge to tackle, a new problem to solve or a new thing to build. I’ve always loved puzzle type games and I like to use that as an analogy for my job. This is what I feel like I’m doing every day – looking for the best solution for a problem that I’m presented with.

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

The most interesting aspect of my role (especially being at a relatively new company) is that I am able to shape the direction that we’re heading in. When presented with a new problem, I am able to go and search for the latest and greatest technologies to help me achieve my desired result; something that wasn’t so easy at my last workplace where everything was already so deeply coupled into legacy software.

What was your path to joining Vortexa?

Prior to joining Vortexa, I had already found myself getting too comfortable at my last role; things had started becoming repetitive and I was struggling to find new challenges. A recruiter then reached out and presented me with Vortexa alongside a few other startups. After having interviews and meeting the teams, I decided that Vortexa was going to be the best fit for me and the place to best advance my career.

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

I’ll keep this one simple:

• A problem solver – it will be challenging and not everything you will come across will have a clear solution. If you can come up with better ways to do things – you will thrive here.
• A team player – it’s no good being the smartest person in the company if you are not able to work well with others. We have an extremely collaborative work environment and being able to fit into it, is of paramount importance.

What do you like about the culture?

What I like most about the culture is being surrounded by people who won’t accept anything less than excellence when it comes to their work. I think this has helped set higher standards for the work I produce, which in turn, has greatly fast-tracked my career. Aside from work, I love being around fun people who are always keen to do things outside of work.

Who do you mostly collaborate with?

Due to the nature of my role I get to collaborate with pretty much everyone. It could be helping the data mining team get a new service out into our cluster, or helping the full-stack team make sure that our API is highly available and fault-tolerant, or making sure that the less technical teams have a smooth experience accessing and interacting with our internal services.

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

Coffee, Slack and our morning standup.

What energises you most about working as a DevOps Engineer?

What energises me the most is being directly responsible for the reliability of our infrastructure, it keeps me on my toes and I pride myself on the success of it.