Employee Spotlight: Natasha Tomattis

Natasha works remotely out of Argentina, where she attended the National University of Córdoba, to develop and monitor the cloud infrastructure for Telnyx microservices.

What do you do at Telnyx?

I’m an Infrastructure Engineer at Telnyx. We take care of the platform and Kubernetes clusters, as well as build machines and infrastructure at the lower level. We implement other services used by developers like DNS, service mesh, and consul services.

What made you pick DevOps / Infrastructure as a career?

When I was studying to be a computer engineer, I really enjoyed networking tasks, then I started a career more related to hardware. I began to get bored with coding, but I’d always wondered what happens behind the code. That’s when I got into Infrastructure.

When did you join Telnyx? What was your work experience before this?

I joined Telnyx in January 2021, so I’ve been here just over a year. The experience has been awesome!

This role is exactly what I had in mind when I began trying to get an infrastructure position. I’m constantly learning about new systems and platforms that I didn’t know about before working at Telnyx, and I have lots of contact with Kubernetes and distributed systems.

Before I joined Telnyx, I was a Machine Learning engineer; I handled infrastructure for data scientists.

What struck you as unique when you first joined Telnyx?

Most companies use a single cloud service provider (CSP), so it’s really interesting that Telnyx runs on multiple CSPs. Because Telnyx has a multi-cloud infrastructure, the platform’s redundancy and resiliency are stronger.

What excites you about what you do?

Each day, I never know what new tools or technology I’ll learn about–I’m constantly learning! For example, we recently started working to implement a service mesh solution for our applications. This solution will allow us to control all traffic between services. I’m super excited about this project because I’m mixing networking concepts with infrastructure to ease the delivery of new features using blue/green canary deploys in a secure and controlled environment.

Could you walk me through your typical work week?

Our Infrastructure team has weekly meetings where we plan out our work on Kanban boards. We use those meetings to go over new projects, divide tasks, and schedule the tasks for each team member.

I’m part of the Infrastructure Core squad, which is in charge of compute provisioning, CI/CD and discovery, and other projects. The Infra Core team's main goal is to ease the deployment of high availability distributed applications. We have daily meetings to update each other on project progress, float ideas, or propose solutions to problems that popped up during the previous day.

I normally receive a project every week or two. When I take ownership of a project, I dedicate the first day or two to design the architecture and plan out tasks for the next few weeks. The planning part is important, because I work on large-scale projects. Once I have a plan, I start tackling individual tasks.

What kind of projects do you work on at Telnyx?

One project I worked on just a few months after starting at Telnyx involved migrating the internal docker registry (an artifacts repository with masses of data) that affected all our production systems. We created and migrated a brand new registry using open source tools and deployed it to Kubernetes.

This took almost two months, but it was well worth it because the system is now stable, and it’s much easier to maintain and add new features.

I was really happy that, even though I was relatively new to the team, they gave me the responsibility of deploying and configuring nearly every aspect of this registry. This project gave me the confidence and experience to make changes to almost any component of the infrastructure managed by our team.

Now I work a lot on critical components of the infrastructure, including managing 12 Kubernetes clusters, 8 Consul datacenters, and a complete (and very cool) CI/CD system.

What is an exciting challenge you’re currently facing?

I enjoy working on Kubernetes clusters that are deployed to different CSPs. If the development team can deploy to different clusters, we can help protect our applications against CSP outages. These clusters need to be consistent; they should have the same monitoring, autoscaling, logging, and security rules.

The challenge here is to have updated infrastructure from each service provider, plus a stack of applications to streamline the development process of Telnyx applications. With each update I learn something new about our CSPs, which is exciting.

What’s it like to work remotely at Telnyx?

This was my first remote role, so it felt a little strange at first. But I felt at ease very quickly, because everyone at Telnyx stays connected, even if we’re geographically far apart. Telnyx has lots of fun, social channels on Slack and we have team catch ups that aren’t work-oriented. I think having that connection on a daily basis is the key to a positive work environment.

How would you describe your team dynamic?

Our team, like the company as a whole, has grown and scaled so much this year that many people are new to Telnyx. My team is full of very fun, lovely people. Our daily meetings inevitably start off with a few minutes of joking and laughing before we get down to business. My team is spread out across the US, South America, Europe, and Asia so it's really great to be able to share our unique cultures and perspectives with each other.

How would you describe the culture at Telnyx?

Employee well-being is definitely a leadership and management priority. My managers, Eugene and Rodrigo, are very considerate, and are always happy to dedicate some time for me. Our people operations team is also there to help in any way they can. The developers I work with are awesome, and everyone at Telnyx is eager to learn and willing to share their knowledge and time.

What do you love about working here?

I am a very curious person. I love learning new stuff, which is why I enjoy working here. In previous roles, I often found myself getting bored, but I know I will never ever get bored at Telnyx.

Does pineapple belong on pizza?

The world is divided over this, but pineapple does not belong on pizza at all!

If you'd like to know more about the Telnyx Team, and learn about opportunities to join our mission, check out our open roles.