Meet the Team at Gousto Tech — Kyle Braithwaite — Platform Engineer
This post is the thirteenth in our series interviewing members of our GoustoTech team. In this post we meet Kyle Braithwaite who is a Platform Engineer in our Potatoes squad.
Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gousto.
Hey, my name is Kyle and I am a Platform Engineer on the Platform Team here at Gousto. The Platform Team is responsible for building and maintaining tooling that enables our engineering squads to easily build, test and deploy their applications to AWS.
How long have you been at Gousto?
I started here in March 2019, just over a year and a half ago at the time of writing this.
Can you tell us a little about your journey until arriving at Gousto?
After studying Computer Science at the University of Greenwich back in 2013, I was lucky enough to join NBCUniversal where I spent the following five years working in their International Digital Team helping build digital products for brands such as Dreamworks, Syfy and hayu.
During my time at NBCUniversal, I worked in a couple of different technical roles before settling into DevOps and using things like AWS, Terraform and Akamai to build cloud solutions for their business.
What made you decide to join Gousto?
After five years at NBCUniversal, it was time to move to a smaller, more tech focused company where I would hopefully have a bigger impact and Gousto offered exactly that. During the interview process I gained some insight into the various challenges that came with scaling a rapidly growing business like Gousto and I knew joining a Platform Team that would support and enable that growth would be an exciting opportunity.
Oh and I also really enjoy food and cooking, so that definitely helped with the decision!
What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto since joining?
On the Platform Team we get involved with all kinds of projects ranging from supporting the launch of our second factory, ensuring our platform meets our continually maturing security standards, through to enabling “build once, deploy anywhere” style immutable deployments for our engineering squads.
While all of these projects have been great learning experiences for me and helped Gousto to scale, one of the things I have found most exciting is growing our Platform Team. In the middle of 2019, it was just myself and our Platform Lead, James working on the team. Now just over a year later we have tripled to six and we are still hiring!
What’s in the pipeline that you’re excited about at Gousto?
There are so many great projects happening here at Gousto it would be hard to choose. Lets just say we have BIG plans for the future and I am excited to see us continue to grow and mature as a business. As the Platform Team, we are part of the foundations that support the business, so we have to be prepared for more customers, more factories and a lot more Gousto engineers!
How would you describe the culture at Gousto?
So I think we can all agree 2020 has been a rough year and for many of us it has meant some big changes, with one of them being remote working. Thankfully at Gousto we have all made an effort to keep our fun, ambitious and collaborative work culture going. I still get to see familiar faces (albeit virtually) during sessions like “Pep-Talk Tuesday” with our Founder, Timo, and weekly team presentations where different teams get to present the great things they have been working on recently.
Having said all that, I definitely miss being in the office with everyone.. online collaboration tools and Google Hangouts will never replace huddling around the whiteboard to solve a problem, heading over to Westfield for a team lunch or enjoying Friday socials and table tennis (some would say too much table tennis) with great team mates. Hopefully that will all return soon…
Why would you suggest that someone considers joining us in Gousto Tech?
From the outside, we are quite a simple business: we sell boxes containing food. However within Tech there are a lot of moving parts that make it all possible. We develop our e-commerce platform, recommendation engine, internal customer care tooling, warehouse management system and much more. With all these different pieces comes some very interesting problems to solve and that’s what makes the job so interesting!
