Meet Douglas Maguire – Senior Infrastructure Engineer

It takes a team of incredible people to deliver exceptional technology and service at Yottaa. This month we profile Douglas Maguire from our operations team!

What is your role at Yottaa?

As a senior infrastructure engineer in the operations group of a small company, my role has more responsibilities than your average industry infrastructure engineer — I need to be a jack of all trades and master of a few. One week I’ll be racking servers and networking, the next week I’ll be automating our tools, tracking down an application issue, or upgrading our systems. The most critical aspects of the role, however, are a passion for technology and a desire to continue learning and innovating.

How does your work impact Yottaa customers?

Without the infrastructure, servers, power, and cables, etc., Yottaa wouldn’t be able to provide a product to our customers. All the code the developers write needs to run somewhere, whether that’s in our data centers or the cloud. The way I positively impact and keep our customers happy is by ensuring our hardware is fully operational at all times.

What did you do before Yottaa that has helped you most in your current role?

The biggest thing that I learned in previous roles was how to operate in a 24/7 SaaS business. In SaaS, we measure our downtime in minutes per year. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of planning and expertise to engineer products to support 24/7/365 uptime. Operational processes are developed to manage risk, and systems are designed from the beginning with redundancy and resiliency in mind, and this is all to keep our product up and our customers happy. In operations, we know that inevitably something out of our control will break at 2 a.m., and in the 24/7 SaaS business, we’re always ready to wake up and get our services back online.

What do you like about your work at Yottaa?

What I enjoy most is the variety of work. As I mentioned earlier, we wear a lot of hats in the operations group. In my previous job, I worked at a company with over 100,000 employees. In big companies, you’re generally relegated to a very specific set of responsibilities. Either you’re a system administrator, an infrastructure engineer dealing only with the hardware, or a network engineer. At Yottaa, I get to do all of those things and more.

How is your work at Yottaa different from your previous jobs?

At Yottaa we’re exclusively a Linux shop, whereas at previous jobs I mostly dealt with Windows servers. I also get to be a lot more hands-on with the infrastructure. For example, I just got back from one of our data centers, where I racked a full cabinet of new servers to expand our capacity. At my previous companies, we would have contractors do this for us. I like having the opportunity to work with the infrastructure hands-on because it allows me to mix up my routine instead of sitting at my laptop every day.

What brief advice do you have for others wanting to enter this profession?

Don’t think your education stops after you earn your degree. Learn to really use a search engine like Google or Bing. You can’t remember everything, and you will eventually run into things you haven’t learned. There’s a wealth of information on the internet if you know how to find it.

What makes Yottaa a great place to work?

I like the people that I work with a lot. It’s a great feeling to come into the office every day and know that you have an incredible team to support you. Additionally, we have a lot of flexibility at Yottaa, and having control over your schedule is an awesome perk. But what really sets Yottaa apart from other companies that I have worked for is our product. Our technology is amazing, and it’s exciting to be part of that.

What do you do when you’re not at the office?

I really cherish golfing with my family and friends, especially when I can play golf with my grandfather and we get 3 generations out on the course. When I’m not working or golfing I enjoy strength training, reading, and a random assortment of other activities.

Want to learn more about the Yottaa team’s dedication to excellence? Check out how we were recognized for contributing improvements to the open-source WAF, ModSecurity 3.