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In my current role, I led a team of 6engineers, 3quality analysts and 3 partner account managers to build and deliver a product for enabling integration with tax authorities government portal and partner tech systems to systematically onboard the partners and consume, validate and pay their invoices in line with local authorities regulatory requirements. My role involved partnering with internal xyz transportation business teams of outbound, import and returns business, financial operations, procurement and controllership teams to align on the business and tech requirements, understand the tech integration dependencies, accounting requirments and define the MVP, change management and then drive the go to market strategy through a dial up. 

This is a product which we release recently it would check the recent breaches that happened exploiting certain vulnarability in the recent past and also check the vulnarabilties in the infrastructure and then provide a score based on severity. the higher the severity the higher the chance of getting breached. This was a great hit but two of our customers came back with a specialised request, the wanted to quantify the severity in terms of revenue loss so it would help them prioratize fixes on the infrastructure. This not only required heavy research but also defining the scope as well that where it fits in. The reason it was important to think about this feature because it was a big contract and our company wanted close it before the end of Q2. I had a planning sessions with the stake holders and product team, we defined the scope of the feature and then communicated with the customer and got all the buy ins, there had to be some repriorization required to imediatle start working on the project, I had a chat with my team and transperantly explained why this was such a high priority for the company and how it aligns with the company goals. This gave boosted their morale and also they saw the advantages of adding this feature and the moral was high.

At Auctane, we had a legacy system which my team was re-architecting to microservices, this meant learning new tools on cloud. One of the tenured engineer was relutant to learn new tech and process. This impacted the teams velocity - I had a meeting with him and explained that him ramping up on new technology was not only necessary but also helpful for his feature. By instlling the growth mindset and showing that his efforts will be benefetial to him in the long run, I could motivate him to learn new tools and be a more productive employee.

I'd like to share a personal anecdote about a time when I failed to reach a metric as a Manager in a Data Engineering project.

Metric: Reduce data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes within 3 months to improve real-time analytics capabilities.

Context: Our team was responsible for building a data pipeline that ingested large volumes of data from various sources into a cloud-based data warehouse. The data was then used to power real-time analytics and reporting for our business stakeholders.

Goal: Our goal was to reduce the data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes to ensure that our analytics capabilities were as close to real-time as possible. This would enable our stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly and respond to changing market conditions.

Plan: Our plan was to optimize the data ingestion process by:

Improving the efficiency of our data processing algorithms

Increasing the scalability of our cloud infrastructure

Implementing a more efficient data storage solution

What went wrong: Despite our best efforts, we were unable to meet the metric. We encountered several issues that slowed us down, including:

Underestimating the complexity of the data processing algorithms, which required more development time than anticipated

Difficulty in scaling our cloud infrastructure due to vendor limitations and cost constraints

Unexpected issues with our data storage solution, which required additional debugging and testing

Impact: Missing this metric had a significant impact on our project. Our stakeholders were not able to get the real-time analytics they needed, which delayed their decision-making and affected our business outcomes.

Lessons learned: This experience taught me several valuable lessons, including:

The importance of robust planning and contingency planning to account for unexpected setbacks

The need for more accurate estimation of development time and resources required for complex tasks

The value of prioritizing and focusing on the most critical components of the project to ensure success

Actions taken: To address these issues, we:

Revised our estimates and created a more realistic project plan

Broke down the task into smaller, more manageable components to improve development efficiency

Implemented additional monitoring and testing to ensure that our data ingestion process was stable and performant

By learning from our mistakes and taking corrective actions, we were able to eventually meet the metric and improve our data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes.

This is a product which we release recently it would check the recent breaches that happened exploiting certain vulnarability in the recent past and also check the vulnarabilties in the infrastructure and then provide a score based on severity. the higher the severity the higher the chance of getting breached. This was a great hit but two of our customers came back with a specialised request, the wanted to quantify the severity in terms of revenue loss so it would help them prioratize fixes on the infrastructure. This not only required heavy research but also defining the scope as well that where it fits in. The reason it was important to think about this feature because it was a big contract and our company wanted close it before the end of Q2. I had a planning sessions with the stake holders and product team, we defined the scope of the feature and then communicated with the customer and got all the buy ins, there had to be some repriorization required to imediatle start working on the project, I had a chat with my team and transperantly explained why this was such a high priority for the company and how it aligns with the company goals. This gave boosted their morale and also they saw the advantages of adding this feature and the moral was high.

I would start by having a private conversation with that person, asking them why openly, trying to understand the reason, as there is often a valid reason, and then I would help that person explore ways to remove that impediment. If there was no valid reason, I would remind them about the importance of being on time to not waste the rest of the team's time, and as a sign of respect to them.

With a major product launch on the horizon, expecting to triple the user load. The infrastructure was non-optimized for demand and incident response was non-harmonious across teams with no set process.

As the SRE Manager, I'd have to implement project changes to infrastructure to accommodate high availability and scalability. I discovered a long-standing issue surrounding incident response and observability that would make it all the more difficult to achieve reliability under pressure and peak traffic.

Therefore, instead of fulfilling the project requirements as presented, I became an advocate for change across the organization. I established an observability platform with 100% stack coverage, created custom SLOs/SLIs/error budgets to enhance performance and reliability visibility, drafted and socialized an incident management playbook across the company and held hands-on trainings for all respective teams. In addition, I advocated for Terraform for Infrastructure as Code to help with deployment time and held FinOps reviews to help eliminate redundant costs in cloud spend.

As a result, we did not only survive the 3X traffic upon product launch with zero critical incidents, but we also achieved 15% saves the following years in cloud costs and 40% faster deployments. Many of the processes I created were adopted as company-wide best practices.