Get to Know: Chris Cousin, Site Reliability Manager
Joined Everbridge
April 2018
Location
Pasadena
What’s your role at Everbridge?
I manage the Site Reliability team for IT Alerting and a few other related products. IT Alerting is similar to Everbridge’s core product — it lets our clients notify their customers and employees about critical events like service interruptions. My team is on the SaaS Ops side, and we partner with multiple dev teams on the Engineering side.
I joined Everbridge a few months ago, and a big part of my role so far has been growing the team. The company is looking for several site reliability engineers, and at least two of them will work with us on IT Alerting.
“Everbridge is results-oriented: it’s about what you’re accomplishing, not where you work 8 or 9 or 12 hours.”
What were you doing before Everbridge?
I’ve done a lot of different things. I was a semi-competitive gamer when I was a teenager, playing Counter-Strike. That got me into computers, and eventually, I got serious about the tech space. I’ve worked in entertainment. I’ve done sales. I was a systems administrator for a high school and for Advertise.com. I helped build out a 30-person Ops team at Ring. I’ve handled security and end-user support all the way to full production and application support, and I’ve been through the transition from legacy to modern architecture. So there are a lot of pieces of my background that are relevant to my work now at Everbridge.
Why did you want to join this team?
Working in startups was a great experience, but I wanted a change, and I felt like Everbridge was the best of both worlds. We have a lot of flexibility here, but also a lot of structure — like Bridge to Everbridge, which is an amazing onboarding program, especially for people who work remotely and in smaller offices. You get to build relationships with people from other departments and offices who you might never meet otherwise. All of those tools and policies are already in place here, and that lets us focus on our work.
Everbridge is also very results-oriented: it’s about what you’re accomplishing, not where you work or whether you put in 8 or 9 or 12 hours. There’s a respect for work-life balance from the C-level on down, and that’s important to me as a manager and as an employee. I want that flexibility for my team members — and I have three daughters under five, so I want to work from home sometimes, too. To quote my manager, “Work is a thing you do, not a place you go.”
“I want my team members to get opportunities to learn the new technologies and processes we’ll be using as we grow.”
And I was really attracted to the mission of keeping people safe. It’s exciting to know that’s what we’re doing every time we add a feature or help a client. “Passion” is one of our company values, and you see that from everyone at Everbridge. When we’re solving a problem, it’s never just, “Okay, that’s taken care of.” It’s also, “Why did we have that issue? Let’s gather some information and make sure we share what we learn with everyone, so we can resolve it company-wide.” That doesn’t happen because we police every task — we don’t. It comes from the passion everyone here has for the work we do.
How do you see your role as a manager?
My management style is very open-door, and I’m big on communication. We have stand ups every day and one-on-ones every week, and I believe in active input and the ability to critique from both the manager and the team member. I always ask, “What should I be doing that I’m not? What am I doing that I shouldn’t be?” And if we make a mistake, I’m the manager — I’ll take the heat. Then we can work together on how to improve.
I’m also big on mentorship and active learning. I want to know what you’re interested in, and I want my team members to get opportunities to learn the new technologies and processes we’ll be using as we grow. I never want anyone to feel like they have to go somewhere else to take their career to the next level.
What do you look for in a new team member?
Active communication is the big one. If you’re struggling with something, I don’t want that to be a secret. I want to work with you and come up with a plan together. Even if it’s just a pet peeve — maybe I use the word “like” too much or you don’t like the emojis I use. That’s okay! I’m not going to completely edit myself, but I’m always happy to work on something and make the environment better for the people on my team.
“There are lot of eyes on us — which means pressure, but also visibility and opportunity.”
I’m also looking for people who are self-starters, and who can effectively manage their time and accomplish what they need to do in a normal workday. And I want you to be conscious of your work-life balance. If you’re overworked and getting burned out, that doesn’t help anyone.
What are some challenges you and your team face?
The move to a more product-based organization has been challenging but exciting. We’re establishing new processes to help us collaborate between SaaS Ops and Engineering, and we’re integrating a lot of cool new technologies. We’re using Terraform, Consul, and Packer from HashiCorp; Salt on the configuration management side; Artifactory for managing packages and artifacts. We’re also building our own homebrew scripts with Python to package our infrastructure as code with configuration management.
The real challenge is not just learning those tools and applying them to legacy systems, but getting to a point where we can collaborate on them with our Engineering counterparts. We want to get beyond execution and ad hoc tasks to a level where we can better support them and do pre-planning in the long term.
What are you most excited about in Everbridge’s future?
I think IT Alerting is particularly exciting right now. Everbridge has put a lot of focus on this space over the past couple of years, and we’re building out the systems and infrastructure to make this product scalable for everyone, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Our team is at the forefront of that effort, and there are lot of eyes on us — which means pressure, but also visibility and opportunity.
More broadly, the team is making major strides toward automating our systems and modernizing our infrastructure and code, which unlocks a whole new set of possibilities, both from the technical side and in the ways we work together. We’re in a phase of active evolution right now, and we’re being empowered to constantly move forward.
