What it’s like to be a DevOps Engineer at the News UK team at Questers? To find out we talked with Atanas Dichev who joined the team back in 2019 and is really passionate about his work. Read what he shared:
How does your typical day at News UK look like?
Funny enough, a day at News UK can hardly be described as typical, due to the simple fact that this is one of the most dynamic workplaces I’ve ever been part of. With its liberal ways of managing work processes and employees‘ engagement, COVID-19 crisis turned out to be not so dramatic for me as I expected it to be in terms of work performance at News. The workday starts with checking the emails and unread Slack messages and going through the meeting schedule for the day. It’s really up to what tasks are on the team board for what the day’s layout would be.
What’s your favourite part of the job?
The team I am part of is called “Engineering Productivity”. Its mission is to promote and incorporate DevОps principles as much as possible throughout the dev teams while completing DevOps related tasks for them, e.g. establishing CI/CD pipelines, migrating applications between runtime platforms, optimizing automated processes, etc. This is probably my favourite part of the job because it gives me the opportunity to get to know each of the company’s brands and broaden the overview of the entire business ecosystem, see the big picture. Also establishing contacts with so many different professionals is awesome.
And the most challenging?
The most challenging part of the job is probably the process of getting context information about a task I’ve been assigned with and onboarding yourself to the current setup of components you need to work with. I guess there is nothing random about Darwin’s quote “It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, but the most adaptable”.
What new skills have you picked up while at News UK?
Amazon Web Services is the skills domain that I found myself spending the most time on. Going in from a Google Cloud background, it was thanks to my awesome team that I got up to speed with AWS various services.
Name the top 3 things that make News UK awesome.
There are lots of things that make News UK an awesome company to be a part of. From the top of my head: exceptional team spirit, that proved itself sustainable during the hard pandemic situation; awesome tech stack, enabling employees to evolve and upgrade their skillset; excellent business culture that combines governed technology principles and liberal position about the choice of tools.
The DevOps team at News UK is growing and we are looking for motivated people to join Atanas and work in the process of a CDN rationalisation. Learn more about the positions here and make sure to apply.
Also, learn more about our relationship with News UK and the culture in their team at Questers here.