What's your job about?
CrowdStrike is one of the leading players in the cyber security and endpoint protection industry. I work within the SRE apac team, whose responsibility is to ensure that the services within the company is up and running all the time. Within our daily job, we would usually spend half of the time developing projects, while another half performing operational tasks. During my first six months of the graduate program, I mainly took part in project tasks and some operational work. I have learned how to setup a gRPC client-server, as well as how to use Docker, and Kubernetes to deploy a service.
What's your background?
Before participating in the graduate program, I finished the Bachelor of Advanced Computing degree in the University of Sydney. With the degree, I got the chance to learn about various technologies in IT (e.g., programming languages, algorithms, UI/UX, security, etc.) In my third year of study, I worked in a startup company as a backend developer intern. There, I got the chance to work with other people and sharpened my skills in backend development. During my final year, I did some research in the IoT field in one of the labs in USYD.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes and no. I believe you need to have some sort of technical skills in place in order to perform the tasks required as an SRE. However, there are certainly different ways to achieve those skills (e.g., through certification, learning, etc.) Some of the key technical skills I would recommend having would be getting to know how to work with a cloud computing environment and being good in one of the programming languages you know. In terms of characteristics, a desire to learn continuously is a must-have for the job.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
I think the coolest thing in my job is that we get the chance to know about both programming and operational work, thus we can see the full picture of deploying a service and maintaining it. This is different to the traditional setting, where programmers only care about developing the program but not deploying it.
What are the limitations of your job?
Although I enjoy and prefer working from home, sometimes it can feel lonely and disconnected. Luckily, CrowdStrike feels concerned about this, and hosts different activities to make everyone connected. For example, a few months ago, I went to the Sydney office and had a great afternoon with other interns in different teams. We got the chance to know about one another and learnt about the responsibilities of different teams within CrowdStrike.
The 3 pieces of advice:
What is your team like?
The SRE-Apac team is friendly and helpful. Whenever you encounter a problem in your work, they are always willing to hop onto a Zoom call and provide us with solid advice or tips to get us through. Outside of Zoom calls, we have Slack channels for us to discuss various different topics.
How do you feel your job plays an important role in society/to the clients?
As an SRE, our job is mainly to ensure the reliability of the services. Having said that, we have to ensure that a service’s uptime is within the SLA defined. In order to ensure that, we have on-call engineers providing 24/7 support for the services. With the services up and running as expected, we can then continue to deliver services and products to our clients.
How do you network and interact with other people at CrowdStrike?
In order to network and interact with other people at CrowdStrike, I would recommend using Slack or heading to the office. There are many different channels in our Slack workspace, I believe you can definitely find one that suits your need. At the same time, I believe heading to the office can definitely offer you a great networking opportunity. In the office, I was able to meet with a large number of people working in different teams, who all provided different insights working in the company (which is an interesting experience to have).