Meet Alex: Building at ServiceNow

I’m passionate about building things or tearing things apart to rebuild them in ways that are better. In my position as a site reliability manager in the product group, I get to do that while supporting my team. I get to help develop my team members into what they want to become and I’m super happy to be learning with them.

My team is part of the Site Reliability Engineering group at ServiceNow. We’re distributed across the world and we have a presence in four different continents. It's our objective to make sure that we provide a reliable environment for customers, so that’s my primary goal here.
 

An interesting project we worked on is what we would call “SRE University.” It's a multi-vertical training program that covers the main technical areas that constitute our work in cloud operations and engineering. Once an engineer completes all the activities for a certain vertical, they are considered an expert on that area and they become a reference to other engineers. It’s an enormous effort that has been pulled together over the years. I'm super happy to be able to facilitate the design and implementation of it. It is really satisfying because it's built by engineers for engineers.

One of the objectives that we have as an engineering group is that we always try to automate manual activities to free up time for value-adding activities. We also aim to reduce the time to resolution when issues arise. When something happens that doesn’t have the right results, these engineers jump in and they talk to each other to discuss several different options. When we work together like this, it’s like magic happens and we have a winning solution.

We have an environment here that’s supportive and I get to be part of creating that for my team. Engineers can organize themselves to determine what is necessary for them to be able to do their work or to improve certain aspects of our infrastructure of our systems to directly impact our customers. When they make the case that something needs to be built, my role is to support that and make sure they see results.

Lately I’ve been managing the team remotely due to COVID restrictions. We miss the opportunities to do things like tap someone on the shoulder or gather in a group to celebrate daily wins, so it is not the same. But I think people are generally conscious of that. Some of us want that social, human interaction component in person. We have great technology at our disposal, and it plays a really important role on how we collaborate remotely. It's certainly something that I haven't seen in my career before, engineers have so many opportunities to develop themselves here. If you like to build things, come to ServiceNow.

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