Ivaylo Andonov, Senior Software Engineer @ team News UK
Ivaylo Andonov is a Senior Software Engineer at team News UK at Questers. He joined the team back in 2019 as a Software Engineer and recently got promoted. We had a chat with him about his career development in News UK, what is he currently working on and what challenges is he facing. Read below.
How did you get here? What is your educational and professional experience?
Well, that was a path full of challenges and personal growth. Here, at NewsUK, I was part of several different teams, which gave me the opportunity to understand our products in depth from a business and technical perspective.
I have a bachelor’s degree from the University of National and World Economy, but in the middle of my education, I discovered my true passion - software development. It all started with Telerik software academy 6-7 years ago where I gained a lot from that dynamic learning environment with a competitive pattern.
After graduating from the academy, I continued my practical experience in several software companies related to dynamic industries such as sports betting, cybersecurity, risk management and public media.
Share more about your career path in the News UK team at Questers.
I am glad that I was among the first ones who joined the team back in 2019. From the very beginning, we were cohesive and motivated for the success and expansion of the team.
Initially, I worked at the Times Components team, then I moved to a completely backend-focused team - Times Public API.
My current role is placed at NewsKit API - a centralised GraphQL API which provides a unified data point to meet the dynamic needs of our web and mobile products across News UK titles.
Now, as a Senior Software Engineer, what are you mainly engaged with
As you can guess this involves more responsibilities and obligations such as technical discussions for solving important issues, making architectural decisions and POCs, participating in infrastructure level improvements, leading communication channels with other teams and dependencies, proactivity in finding missing information, and last but not least, mentoring and helping with the on-boarding new joiners.
Tell us more about the technologies you are using in News UK?
I dare to say that the technologies used in NewsUK are literally cutting-edge. Most are JS based and each team makes a choice about them according to their goals. At NewsKit API we are using NodeJS, GraphQL, Apollo Server, Typescript. Our infrastructure is based on AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform. For CI/CD we are fully integrated with CircleCI.
How do you tackle the tech challenges you face as a team? Give us an example of a recent problem the team has solved.
With the data federation API and the new technologies, we use, we often encounter technical obstacles for which not much is written on the Internet. In time, we have built a culture and a habit of making technical huddles where we discuss all faced issues in details, giving ideas and list all possible solutions and alternatives.
The last problem we solved was related to the inspection, formatting and logging of hidden errors with different content types initiated by our data providers and send them in our monitoring system - New Relic.
Team News UK at Questers continues to grow. Check out the latest opportunities and make sure you apply here.