Career Spotlight: Senior SRE

In June 2014, Ronan O’Keeffe joined Distilled as a Systems Admin. We caught up with Ronan to chat about his life, his career journey, and what advice he would give people starting out on the same career path as him.

Tell us about your career before Distilled (What you aspired to be as a kid, your education, first role out of school/college, and the path to Distilled)

After leaving school I studied Applied Science (Biotechnology) in WIT. My very first job when I left college was to go back to that same college and paint it 🙂. Shortly after that I ended up studying photography for three years and only after that I first became interested in computing.

Why did you choose Distilled at the time you joined?

Distilled didn’t exit at the time, I interviewed for a role in DoneDeal and have been working at Distilled for over 8.5 years now. It’s great that we’ve maintained the same level of fun that we had pre merger and the team has only gotten stronger since.

What was your first role in Distilled? How have you progressed since first joining the company? (either in roles or in personal/professional skills)

My first role in DoneDeal was as a sys admin and we’ve since renamed the team to SRE i.e. Site Reliability Engineering.

Distilled has a great career path lined out for everyone with clear progression and guidance as to what’s needed to move to the next step on your chosen career track. I am currently a Senior SRE.

What would be your advice to graduates just starting out their career in this field? (ie. your field of work, eg Marketing, HR etc)

I’m not sure if you can qualify as an Ops type engineer anywhere yet. People in this role tend to fall into a pattern where the role finds them rather than them finding the role.

Don’t be intimidated by the plethora of tech that can surround you. People in this role can run a lot of software in a lot of places and it can be overwhelming. So you lean on your team for support and grow as you go. Soon you’ll be in a position where you can offer that support back to the next person in your team and aid both your own and their growth.

And whatever you do, maintain a sense of humour no matter what happens!

What is the best piece of advice that you’ve received that has helped you get to where you are today?

I’m sure I was offered plenty of advice in the past, I’m also sure I didn’t always listen to it. Maybe that’s advice in itself…don’t be afraid to go your own way!

#createwithpurpose #playyourpart #belonghere #greatplacetowork #lifeatdistilled