What gets a systems engineer out of bed in the morning — and what keeps them up at night?
It depends on who you ask. Every systems engineer helps build products and ensure they run properly. But what that looks like at each company can be markedly different.
For example, at DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure company, Senior Engineer Vishal Verma said that his role allows him to work in several areas, like infrastructure, storage and internal tech adjustments, giving his day multiple dimensions. One of his biggest responsibilities — and interests — lies in keeping the company’s products running smoothly. And because there are over 3.5 million developers using DigitalOcean’s services, performance is always top of mind.
Verma filled us in on what he’s working on, why innovation and passion is key to his role and why teamwork is essential for any engineer.
Walk us through a typical day for you as a systems engineer. What are some of the key tasks on your to-do list?
As a systems engineer at DigitalOcean, I focus on keeping our infrastructure highly performant. I support various teams across our organization, from storage and compute to our DigitalOcean Control Center team.
Some key tasks on my to-do list include ongoing testing to ensure everything is running smoothly across our fleet, monitoring kernel performance, maintaining internal packages and provisioning our internal changes through Chef, a configuration management tool.
What’s a current or recent project you’ve worked on that was really interesting or challenging?
As a systems engineer, I’m always looking to find new ways to help improve our performance. This has been a really exciting area of focus for me because every test we complete helps make the experience of our customers that much better!
I have also enjoyed building a new performance telemetry service for our team, written in Golang. The project involved crunching and processing a vast amount of data, which enabled us to make even better business decisions around our fleet efficiency.
A successful software engineer should be passionate about taking on challenges.”
In your experience, what’s one of the most important skills a systems engineer needs to be successful?
Besides education and knowledge, a successful software engineer should be passionate about taking on challenges.
In a fast-working environment like DigitalOcean, you must be a problem-solver, an innovative thinker and a hard worker. Most importantly, a successful engineer should be a team player, have a positive outlook and be able to keep their cool.
