Automate processes. Code in a variety of languages. Troubleshoot authentication mechanisms. Optimize SaaS applications. According to two Boston engineering professionals, these are just some of the tasks systems engineers tackle on a daily basis.
Below, an associate director of enterprise at online pet supplies retailer Chewy, and a senior site reliability engineer at bakery and ingredient e-commerce platform Dawn Food Products, walk us through what a typical day looks like in each of their roles.
They also shared an interesting project they’ve recently worked on as well as what skills systems engineers should harbor in order to be successful at their respective companies. Both engineers agreed that a customer-first mentality and an ability to work cross-functionally are crucial components for success.
Unlike some other companies, systems engineers at Chewy, an e-commerce platform for pet supplies, are customer-facing. Jonathan Reynolds, the associate director of enterprise systems, said that as a result, successful systems engineers at the company operate with a sense of urgency and a desire to do the right thing, regardless of how difficult the task is.
What’s your typical day like as a systems engineer?
Being a systems engineer means being at the center of mission-critical, backbone platforms across the enterprise. It’s a perfect role for people who thrive on “organized chaos” and don’t like doing the same thing every day.
Tasks vary widely but include:
- Designing and troubleshooting authentication mechanisms through active directory security groups and Okta SAML or OIDC apps. This includes being central to the flow of “people data,” using demographic attributes to create dynamic groups where possible and understanding how each system gets its data.
- Acting as the final escalation tier and performing general care-and-feeding of our core platforms, monitoring resources of our active directory domain controllers, making sure they can handle the demand and planning for the next domain functional level.
- Integrating disparate systems, whether by out-of-the-box integrations or custom API scripting.
- Managing and optimizing our ever-growing portfolio of SaaS applications.
- Acting as a trusted partner between IT and business, collecting their pain points and turning them into solutions — or liaising them into existing tools they didn’t know we had.
What’s an interesting project you’ve recently worked on?
An exciting and challenging project we are currently engaged in is switching our cloud-based email security platform. With the new provider, we will save thousands of dollars annually and gain access to more capabilities than before. We recently finished the lift-and-shift of what we had with the previous provider — inbound filtering and threat analytics only — and completed it flawlessly in only a month!
We’re now working on releasing new features like:
- Outbound filtering.
- A plugin to interact with your quarantine or report spam right from Outlook.
- Office 365 mailbox backup and restore.
- Email continuity.
- Automated threat remediation.
Thankfully, based on previous lessons learned, we crafted a communication strategy to prepare our team members for this upcoming change multiple times in advance — and continue to do so as we roll out new features — so we haven’t created a burden on our service desk!
Being a systems engineer means being at the center of mission-critical, backbone platforms across the enterprise.”
What are some important skills a systems engineer needs to be successful?
I would say a customer-first mentality is the most crucial. As a systems engineer, you’re typically not customer-facing, but at Chewy, our customers extend to our internal team members. Successful systems engineers understand and internalize this, always aiming to deliver exceptional experiences, striving to understand and anticipate needs and being relentless about fulfilling them. They have a sense of urgency and a desire to do the right thing, regardless of how difficult. They’re able to adapt — the most successful engineers are a “jack of all trades and a master of some.”
The required skill sets are extremely broad, so systems engineers are best served with a mindset for the holistic enterprise environment, determining how systems fit together in new ways to make them more efficient and powerful. They’re passionate about growing, which often means digging in and becoming a subject matter expert in a platform that nobody has experience with yet and being able to handle multiple in-flight projects at the same time, often with shifting requirements and deadlines.
But most of all, it means having empathy, compassion and a bent toward the collaborative. With this, everything else falls into place.
In order to be successful at Dawn Food Products, an e-commerce hub for bakery products and ingredients distribution, systems engineers need a well-rounded knowledge set. Aside from a basic engineering foundation, Senior Site Reliability Engineer Siddharth Singh said they also need to be adept at problem-solving and able to work well with other engineers on the team.
What’s your typical day like as a systems engineer?
At Dawn Foods, our customer is at the center of all that we do, so my role is customer-focused. Our customers start very early in the day and create a shopping list and place their orders. So, my first priority is to keep Dawn Foods’ digital platform up and running, smoothly, every day.
The following is a list of key tasks on my to-do list every day:
- Check any alerts for failed orders or any other alerts.
- Check that all nightly jobs are successful.
- Check that the application’s monitoring dashboard looks good.
- Scrum meeting.
- One-on-one meetings with developers for discussing and resolving technical roadblocks.
- Find opportunities for automation.
- Improving CI/CD automation, infrastructure creation and patching.
- And lastly, take part in architectural design discussion.
What’s an interesting project you’ve recently worked on?
The most interesting project I recently worked on was the setup of the application’s monitoring dashboards, alerts, application performance monitoring (APM) and logging.
A few challenges I faced were on the integration of monitoring tools in our application, removing the unnecessary logs from each service and the APM setup. But for me, these challenges turned out to be fun! I was able to cover a wide range of topics to improve the code performance and learn the details of the services’ behaviors and interact with different engineers on the team. It’s always delightful and fun to help team members debug issues and provide them information on their code’s behaviors.
As a systems engineer at Dawn Foods, my first priority is ensuring our digital platform is up and running, smoothly, every day.”
What are some important skills a systems engineer needs to be successful?
The basic foundation for SREs or systems engineers includes monitoring, alerting, minimizing toil, SLOs, release cycle and, most importantly, automation. It also requires being adept at problem-solving, working as part of a team, having exceptional communication skills and solving reliability problems.
Below are few of the most important skills system engineers need to be successful at:
- Software-centric thoughts.
- Coding in any language.
- Understanding the application software stack.
- Automating any and all manual efforts.
- Not fearing complexity and scale.
- Ability to continuously learn new things.
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