Vestmark is a leading provider of portfolio management/trading solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors, enabling them to efficiently manage and trade customized client portfolios through an innovative SaaS platform.
We connected with Michael Maggioli to get a look at what a day in the life of a Senior Cloud Engineer at Vestmark looks like.
In this video, Michael answers.
- What is your role and responsibilities?
- A typical day in the life
- What attracted you to Vestmark?
- Advice for someone looking to join Vestmark
Video Transcript
My name is Mike Maggioli. I’m a Senior Cloud Engineer in the managed services department here at Vestmark.
Core Responsibilities
My responsibilities can vary quite a bit. At the core of my work, we are migrating a physical data center—our physical data center footprint—into AWS. My work tends to come with supporting that cloud footprint with:
- Infrastructure versioning, new releases, and features.
- Automation.
- Best practice architecture design.
A lot of my work tends to do with design. We have quite a bit of creative freedom when it comes to developing new solutions, which is awesome. It really makes you feel like you have a voice when coming up with new solutions to propose to your team or the company or anybody who’s going to be affected by your decisions, kind of the downstream stakeholders.
Oftentimes, architecting, there isn’t a correct, true way to do something. You typically start somewhere and then improve on it as you go until you find the ideal build setup.
Some of my other responsibilities include:
- Troubleshooting architecture.
- Bug fixes within Terraform, which is the language that we tend to use for infrastructure as code.
- Writing scripts for various automation tasks in languages like Python, PowerShell, or Bash.
A Typical Day
I try to remain as active as I can. I’m normally awake around 6:30 in the morning to go to the gym as many days as I can. After that, I’m home to wash up, have breakfast, and my coffee—coffee religiously. And then let my dog out, give her breakfast. She’s a big part of my routine.
I sign on most mornings around 8:30, 8:45, and then until about 10 a.m. or so, I’m typically catching up on tickets from yesterday, previous ones in the week I haven’t had time to look at, and responding to Slack messages and channels.
The day can kind of vary after that. Sometimes I’m in meetings until noon or later. Sometimes I’m in meetings I’m done after 30 minutes. Infrastructure as a whole is very collaborative, so you tend to be on a lot of meetings with stakeholders like operations teams, project management, delivery team, software developers—the list goes on.
After my morning meetings, my afternoons tend to be my own. That’s where I can really buckle down and get my work done. I’m able to help any other engineers if they need assistance with something. It tends to be my most productive time frame. I do try to get outside. I work from home, but I do try to get outside as much as I can on my lunch break, whether walking my dog or playing fetch with her or just, you know, going for a drive somewhere until signing back on.
Evenings after my work is done, I try to disconnect as much as I can. I’m guilty of checking Slack after hours. I know work-life balance is critical to not burn yourself out, but it can be hard to fully disconnect from work sometimes, especially if you know someone on your team or in your department that needs a hand with a problem—solutions that you can provide to them. I’ve been there. I’ve been in those scenarios where you have to fix a problem after hours, and you really just hope that a senior engineer can sign on and help you out or provide that relief. So I try to be that engineer that people know that they can call on as much as possible.
Why Vestmark?
I actually started at Vestmark in our production support department as an intern for a year. Then I had signed on full-time prior to graduating college. From there I kind of dove head first into the databases. I started with really simple SQL queries that slowly became more and more elaborate. I started writing ones for data analysis and performance analysis and various kinds of troubleshooting.
I think that in support I really learned the culture and teamwork that Vestmark heavily encouraged. I think it was there that I decided I wanted to stay with the company for a long time. Vestmark has four core values: We Before Me, Positive Energy, Knowledge Explorer, and Own It. Every employee is really pushed to embody these values and to go into every day with a positive outlook, to really strive to keep learning and pushing your knowledge base, to be a good team player, a good teammate, and to be accountable for all of your work.
Beyond these core values, I have loved the people that I work with. I love the work that I do as a cloud infrastructure engineer. A lot of people I talk to every day are some of my closest friends, even outside of work. I’ve had nothing but the most supportive managers and directors that want to see my career grow and want to see me doing work that I enjoy and that challenges me. I would say that beyond anything else, the people are the reason that I love to sign on to work every day.
Advice for Candidates
I would say whether you’re in school and you’re looking for your first technical job or if you’re a senior level engineer or beyond, I think that Vestmark is a great spot to work. I think one thing I try to communicate as much as possible in candidates that we’re looking for is the desire to grow and to be challenged or to look for more efficient solutions to things that we’re doing every day.
I’m a heavy believer that complacency is the enemy of growth. And if you’re signing on to work every day and you are being challenged or you’re not seeing a way to tackle a new problem, or you’re not innovating, you’re not being challenged, I think that you are not growing. And that is one thing that Vestmark is really supportive of is they will always find ways to encourage your growth, encourage that you see new problems to tackle every day.
I’ve been able to grow from an associate engineer that just started writing SQL queries with little more knowledge than the fact that AWS is a cloud provider to a Certified Solutions Architect, a Senior Cloud Engineer, and because of the support I’ve received from both of my managers and my teammates every day.
