Pauline

I am a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in OneDrive and SharePoint in Microsoft. How did I end up here? Some of you that know me might ask that question…

I did a college degree in Biomedical Engineering and therefore didn’t have the standard background that you usually find for a person in my position. I got several work experience opportunities after college that brought me closer each time to infrastructure and software backend problems, rather than biomedical devices.

My last internship at the end of college was about medical imaging processing and I got lucky enough to travel to Princeton, New Jersey in the USA, where I discovered what it was to live outside of my own country (I am originally from France). This was a great opportunity, where I used a good few skills I learned from college and also some computer engineering skills.

When it ended and I went back to France to look for a job, I got an opportunity in a Medical Software company in Ireland and jumped on it, as I wanted to travel again. Back then I never thought that 9 years later, I would still be living in Ireland.

The more I moved between roles and the more I learned, I realized that I was slowly switching from my college degree to knowledge more related to computer engineering. Funny enough, I still remember some friends back in college that told me I should try computer engineering as I already knew more than some of the other students in their degree. But anyway, I have learned a lot by doing the job, spending a lot of time trying to understand how all the systems work together and debugging the tools.

In my job before Microsoft, I was working in a small company, where we still had a lot of manual steps everywhere. While there, I worked on tools to help automate the deployment (still a bit manual when I left but far less than before). Automating the deployment was something our clients had probably never heard of, but automatic alerting was something that project managers were really selling to our clients. It made me look closer on how the giants from the cloud industry were dealing with the size and the scale they were working with and I discovered the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discipline.

This was the point in my career where I decided that I was happy to move out of the healthcare sector to learn more in a field that really interested me. I really liked the job offer at the time from Microsoft for SRE as it was really open to people of diverse professional backgrounds, and to unique individual skills and personal characteristics. So I applied and hoped they would reply to me because the offer made it sound like a great company that was open to differences and since my background and my CV didn’t look like the traditional computer engineering or system engineering CV. And it worked out, I got interviewed, did the full process, and ended up joining Microsoft at the end of 2018.

Microsoft is an impressive company to work with. First you have the scale of everything. I came from a world where I knew each server by name, but here it is impossible to even look at the server level. It’s too small of a sample size.

Then, you have the number of people working here, thinking that every day, you speak to people from everywhere in the world, where “what time is it for you?” becomes a standard question. In Microsoft Ireland itself, there are more than 71 nationalities working here.

My own team is in 3 regions in the world and can be a 24/7 team that works during the day only. We have people in Suzhou (China), Redmond (USA) and Dublin (Ireland). Talking together requires a bit of organisation and flexibility from the different regions but we all make the effort we need from time to time to ensure we consider the other people’s work-life balance.

Our team is responsible to ensure that OneDrive Business and SharePoint are always up and running and that any problem that arises has minimum impact for our users.

This includes being on-call, meaning that we will be the first people to get paged if there is an alert or incident in our service. Inside the team we do a rotation for on-call persons, but even on those days, you know you are never on your own. The full team is there to help if needed. And also if you have some personal things that prevent you from being fully there, people will always jump in to help you. Knowing that for me is so great as I am a mother of two little girls. I know that if I have a childcare problem or one of them is sick, my colleagues would always be there for me, replacing me when on-call, and obviously the opposite is true, where I would be there for them if needed.

The other main part of my role is on projects. One type of project is to improve the reliability of the service by doing root cause analysis and fixing the service, working on new projects to improve the service. This work is collaborative between the SRE teams and other engineering teams. The other types of projects we have is to improve our daily life when on-call by improving our alerting, improving our alert enrichment to allow faster mitigation from the on-call person, as well as automation to mitigate the impact. As we work with a fast-changing environment, we always learn new things and be re-active to update our way to work all the time.

To conclude, working at Microsoft for me has been a great experience so far. I have met a lot of different people that all share the same goals and have witnessed that this is a company that really value everybody’s differences, emphasizes a lot on work-life balance and drives you to keep learning new things every day. From growing up and studying in France, to getting to live and experience various cities around the world and gaining a foothold in the world of Biomedical Engineering, all before settling in Ireland, having my family and discovering my true professional passion; I feel like I’ve finally found my place in the world of Engineering.