Career Takeoff — Interview with Cloud Engineer Marc-Enzo Bonnafon
Teads welcome young talents. We believe in learning by doing, and think real-world experience is a unique opportunity to build valuable knowledge. Under the guidance of a mentor, interns at Teads embed within a team and are assigned a project that fits within their internship.
In this first article of our new interview series called “Career Takeoff” we showcase young talents to learn more about their journey to Teads, their projects and what they love about working here.
What do you do at Teads?
Hello, I’m Marc-Enzo, I recently joined Teads’ Infrastructure team as a Cloud Engineer in Paris for my end-of-studies internship. The Infrastructure team is transversal, it requires a really diverse set of technical skills: from communication and project management to software engineering, network architecture, and cloud systems.
“Our role is to provide and manage the core services, tools and systems that allow other feature teams to test, build, deploy and run their applications in production.”
These applications handle a huge amount of incoming traffic and perform intensive computing work. Therefore, one of our main challenges is to guarantee the availability of the platform and its scalability, while managing the costs incurred by the underlying components.
Overall, and as we are supporting other teams and services, our job includes a lot of communication. This is particularly true as we embrace the DevOps philosophy, involving a lot of collaboration with other teams.
What’s a typical day at Teads, and what are you working on right now?
There’s no such thing as a typical day at the Infrastructure team. The only constant is our Daily Standup Meeting, a short 15 min moment in the morning where we discuss our current tasks and issues we may be facing. This is very useful as we are a distributed team. We all have a big focus task per quarter (our main EPIC) but we also need to handle the day to day tasks.
During my internship, I’ve been focusing on setting up a new Bastion solution to secure and normalize the way we SSH into machines.
It implies rethinking the way we manage feature teams SSH accesses on our servers and the security that goes with it. I started by refining the needs and designing a global architecture to address them, followed by a PoC of several solutions. I then shared my findings with the team and we discussed together which solution we would like to implement. I identified BLESS, an open-source software from Netflix, as a solution that matched our requirements.
We decided to add a local Golang client inspired by an open-source solution. Right now, I’m working on deploying it to production following the MVP principles (Minimum Viable Product) in order to quickly have a core set of features available.
What is the most challenging part of your job?
I was thrown into the Teads tech stack with little knowledge about it and it was quite thrilling. So I can say that my first challenge was to keep up with the consistent technical training I received by my mentor and also learn the team philosophy and processes in place.
The second challenge is more related to the Tech side of the Advertising industry (AdTech). Although I grasped where Teads stands in the industry I had no clue what a DSP was or what Real-time bidding implied technically.
Our industry is constantly changing, and the engineering team pushes a lot of new features on a daily basis. As an Infrastructure Engineer, we need to embrace these changes and be up to date with all new technologies on the market. Being aware of which one is mature enough to fit our needs and bring the best value for us is very challenging!
What do you like the most about working at Teads?
Even before joining, I was struck by the level of the technical tests during the interview process. The interviewers focused on assessing my ability to learn new things, be it Tech, Culture, AdTech, Methodology, etc. At each step of the process, I was guided to show the best version of myself. As I received an offer I thought that there would be some great challenges and this would be a unique learning opportunity.
That guess was spot on! Our stack is really state of the art. I also think that the AdTech environment really stimulates us, it pushes us to make choices.
“I’m fascinated by the impact of user traffic variation over time and what it means for our infrastructure in terms of scalability. Using the cloud and autoscaling groups make a lot of sense here.”
On a final note, I can say that the team is quite lively and my dear colleagues have a great sense of humor. Even though we are distributed, we regularly meet in person and share cool moments together.
