Navigating My Career to Scale at ThousandEyes
by Derek Chen-Becker, Principal Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes
Hi, my name is Derek, and I’m Cisco ThousandEyes’ newest Principal Engineer. Having completed my second month, I’m excited to share some insights into my experience for anyone interested in joining the team or following my career footsteps.
Education and Career First Steps
In college, I was immensely interested in computer graphics and communications. Later, when I was in graduate school, these interests matured into a focus on data visualization techniques and large-scale computer networks.
My first job out of college was working on a large LAN for my school. I followed that with a long span at a retailer, where I designed and built out a 3000+ site broadband/VPN network for digital image transfer. Basically, I was a network engineer for them and continued to be for over ten years, with increasingly complex monitoring, deployment, and maintenance as the years went on.
Along the way, I returned to my programming roots. I wrote tools and systems to manage and monitor all of the devices and connectivity in the network, eventually transitioning from full-time network engineer to software developer in the distributed systems and database spaces.
ThousandEyes On My Mind
When I first learned about ThousandEyes, two thoughts immediately crossed my mind:
- ThousandEyes is a platform I wish I had access to during my network engineering phase. I can’t overstate how important (and challenging) effective visibility is for network stability.
- Being able to work at ThousandEyes would combine all of the things I love about computing: networking, data visualization, and scale — all within the realm of fast-paced software development.
Just as important as the technical checkboxes, I found that the overall engineering and corporate culture were amazing (more on this in a moment). In other words, ThousandEyes felt like the perfect fit.
So I applied, and I got the job!
My experience in my first two months at ThousandEyes has reinforced my initial impressions of the company. My onboarding experience, in particular, has been exceptional. It was apparent the team had carefully planned the whole process and dedicated a great deal of effort to ensuring my success. Most importantly, everyone has made me feel welcome and included.
I was lucky enough to join just before this year’s Hack Day. Despite being incredibly new, I was encouraged to join a team and participate. The experience was incredibly fun and taught me a lot, all while I got to meet many of my colleagues. This engagement also ties into the biggest perk of working at ThousandEyes: the people. It’s clear that ThousandEyes maintains a high bar for hiring, and everyone I’ve met so far is happy, helpful, smart, and passionate about our product.
Tackling Big Challenges
One of the things I’m most excited about here at ThousandEyes is the scale of our work. The Internet is incredibly large; there are billions and billions of devices connected to it, with everything from servers and desktops down to cell phones and refrigerators. That number continues to increase exponentially with no signs of slowing.
At ThousandEyes we help our customers understand the connectivity health between their endpoints and applications in the vast sea of devices online today. The insights we generate come from hundreds of thousands of vantage points across the Internet, generating over 2 billion unique data points for analysis daily.
A lot of time and energy goes into building agents that are both efficient and highly capable. The management and orchestration of tests across all of those vantage points also require a high bar for our operations teams. I’m looking forward to working on ways we can continue to grow efficiently with our customers as they deploy more agents to gain richer insight into employee and customer experiences and network, cloud, and Internet health.
Another aspect related to scale that I’m excited to work on here at ThousandEyes is operational excellence. Our customers trust our data because we’ve invested substantially in the stability and consistency of our agents and platform. As we continue to incorporate new features and capabilities into our service, we will encounter challenges in deploying, running, and managing the various components. Ensuring that ThousandEyes is always ready to provide timely insight in the face of growing scale will require planning, ingenuity, and a commitment to doing the hard things the right way. I’ve spent the last several years of my career working on large-scale operations, and I want to bring some of my experience and learnings in this area to the team in the near future.
The Journey Forward
Networks, from the Internet down to the WiFi at home, play an incredibly vital role in our connected world, touching on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In that landscape, there are many challenges as well as opportunities for companies as they interact with their customers and employees. As such, for IT professionals, identifying and resolving connectivity issues promptly is not just a nice-to-have skill, it is an essential one.
ThousandEyes is uniquely positioned to provide that solution with our combination of large-scale data capture and world-class data analysis. With our recent announcements about increased visibility through Meraki and Webex endpoints, our visibility into connectivity and performance across the Internet and enterprise networks stands unsurpassed. Plus you can bet we’re hard at work developing new ways to leverage our data for quicker and better insights into network issues, so our customers can focus instead on what they do best.
If what I’ve discussed here today interests you, please check our Careers page for open roles!
