Meet Sami El Feki, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Plotly

Life at Plotly: People & Culture Blog #27

What do you do at Plotly?

For the past six months, I’ve been part of the Plotly Cloud team working on the infrastructure that runs plotly.com/cloud. Before that I was a DevOps engineer in the IT team helping around with Dash Enterprise infrastructure. I initially joined Plotly a little over a year ago as a QA Engineer contractor in the Plotly Studio team.

What three words describe your Plotly experience?

Compassionate. Pragmatic. Result-oriented.

What’s your favorite work-from-home snack or beverage?

Coffee! For better or for worse.

If you were to describe Plotly as a color or a flavor, what would it be and why?

Probably the color magenta because that’s the most interesting color in the Plotly logo. I recently learned that magenta doesn’t actually exist in the visible light spectrum. It’s a perception created by the brain when both red and blue light receptors in the eye are stimulated, but not the green ones.

What skill are you most proud of developing?

Prior to joining Plotly my background was pure backend development with minimal cloud infrastructure experience. I wanted to pivot my career into Platform/DevOps engineering and had the privilege of working under a former manager at Plotly, who was willing to take a chance on me not having any prior DevOps experience. Taking the General Availability launch of Plotly Cloud as a measure of success, I’d say I’m pretty happy with what I’ve learned in the past year about building production-ready infrastructure.

What’s your favorite part about working at Plotly?

The Montréal office, with its people and pets. I graduated during the pandemic and 100% remote work has been the norm for me. Even though Plotly remains fully remote we have an office where a small group of us willingly show up most days of the week.

How has Plotly shaped your perspective on remote work or data visualization?

I’m currently on-call as the first responder for production incidents during the Plotly Studio and Cloud GA launch. One core part of my job is looking for anomalies in our production observability dashboard. Well visualized-data is definitely something I’ve taken for granted until now! I’m eager to experiment with dumping all our production observability data into a Plotly Studio project and seeing what comes out.

Most memorable team activity?

A pub trivia night with a few colleagues from Plotly back when I was based in Vancouver. I think we came in second place. I’ve kept in touch with a few folks from that night and since then consider them friends outside of work.

Favorite way to connect with the team remotely?

I like the company-wide random 1:1s that get auto-scheduled once a month. I’ve had a few interesting conversations that went way past the scheduled meeting time with people I would otherwise never have spoken to.

What’s your favorite hobby?

I’ve cycled through a bunch in the past few years like rock climbing and drumming. Reading has turned out to be the most enjoyable and maintainable. This past summer I joined a reading group for Homer’s Odyssey and it was out of this world. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been that deeply invested in a hobby.

Proudest accomplishments at Plotly?

Seeing Plotly Cloud and Studio finally go live for GA, putting a ribbon on a year’s worth of engineering work. This is my first time working with a team on a major SaaS product from scratch and learning what works — or more frequently, what doesn’t — has been invaluable for my career growth.

What are you most excited about for the future of Plotly or your team?

The work my team does is directly influenced by our Product team’s interpretation of the needs of Plotly Studio and Cloud’s user base. I’m eager to find out how these tools get used in the wild since it directly influences my own work day-to-day.

How do you stay creative or innovative in your role?

I like positioning myself as close as my role allows me to the critical path of a company’s success. Regular interactions with people who are invested in the outcome of my work is what drives me to do my best.

What advice would you give to someone aspiring to work in Engineering at Plotly?

Find out what people actually care about. Learn how to be okay with uncertainty. Change is inevitable; learn to adapt.

Where’s your favorite place to travel?

Tunisia, it’s where I grew up before moving to Canada a decade ago. I try to visit once a year and stay in touch with my extended family.