A Day In the Life: Jeremy, Infrastructure Engineer

In 2022 and beyond, we’ll be showcasing some of our team members with Q&A sessions about life at Finite State. See our previous post here.

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In our second day-in-the-life post, I’ll be highlighting Jeremy McIntyre, an Engineer on the Infrastructure team. Jeremy joined Finite State in July of 2021 after seeking a company that would help him learn and grow.

How did you come to join Finite State?

When I first reached out, I was in a bit of a lull. I wasn’t learning much any more in my previous job. I talked to a recruiter and they gave me a couple of options. Finite State was the one that stuck out and the only one I was interested in hearing back from. I’m not just saying that because I work here now! It was honestly the employer I wanted to hear back from. I’ve always been interested in cybersecurity and was working in DevOps a bit and infrastructure some, so that’s why it was great to come on in an infrastructure role.

What does your role at FS entail?

My work here is on the infrastructure team. It’s more of a service team, not unlike an IT team in that we enable our developers to push the code they want without any friction. Because of how important our mission is to the world of connected devices, it’s crucial that the Finite State development teams have internal support for the challenges that they face in developing the product. My role as an infrastructure engineer is integral to the success of the larger company, and that is a great feeling to have.

What are you most excited about working on in the next quarter/year?

We’re working to migrate a lot of our services to Kubernetes and doing a lot of that this quarter. I think we’ll be busy with that for a while, and that’s what I’m most excited about because I haven’t gotten much of a chance to work with Kubernetes here yet, but I really like doing that.

Who is your favorite coworker at Finite State and why?

My team is my favorite. Outside of my team, there are two that come to mind that I really enjoy working with. I’d say Tim [Senior Security Researcher and Software Engineer]—I like working with him even though I’ve only gotten to a little bit so far. We’ve taught each other a good amount; he taught me a lot about the application and I taught him about infrastructure to the point where he could probably do a lot of infrastructure work on his own.

How do our company values (Transparency, Results, Accountability, Customer Dedication, Courage) impact your work?

Transparency is first and foremost in my mind. The work we’re going to be doing on this team impacts a lot. In infrastructure if you make any kind of large scale change it has an impact on both our developers and our customers. I post everything in our slack’s #engineering channel in case I see any issues. Even when I think there’s going to be a bigger impact and there isn’t as much of one as I thought, it’s better to be safe than sorry. 

I’m very transparent and that’s something I didn’t necessarily bring to my previous roles because there was always a lot of secrecy. Here I see tons of posts in our engineering channel about people’s challenges and problems, and I love how transparent people are about working through their engineering struggles and that’s an environment I wasn’t used to working in. Finite State is my first startup, so that might be why that’s the case.

After two years of pandemic remote work, where would be your ideal place to hang out with your co-workers for an all-hands offsite?

I love the Bay Area so I’m going to keep harping on that—somewhere in the Bay Area. I love the weather there. San Francisco would be great.

What would you tell a friend who was considering a job at Finite State?

I actually did refer a friend for a role recently! I think what I told my friend (I’ll paraphrase), was that Finite State is a great place to work. They value their employees, and the problems we’re solving are both really hard and really fun to work on.

How do you think cybersecurity will be impacted by recent developments in the world?

We’ll probably see more legislation. We won’t know about them for a while but we’ll see more attacks and more attack vectors. More and more CVEs will be coming to light every day, I think.

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We love to hear that the problems we’re solving are fun, despite the challenges the industry is facing. It’s folks like Jeremy that keep our own team and products running, and for that we’re grateful. 

Ready to join a team like Jeremy’s? We’re waiting for you! Check out our jobs page and apply to our open positions. Think you can contribute but don’t see the perfect opening? Reach out to jobs@finitestate.io to discuss how you think your experience could contribute to our mission of securing the connected world.