Meet Mihail, Senior Cloud Engineer

Our Cloud Engineering team takes care of Tide’s digital infrastructure. Without this team, we wouldn’t be able to maintain and improve the Tide app. It’s thanks to them that the business bank account you have in your pocket is secure and reliable. 

In this post we meet Mihail, one of our Senior Cloud Engineers based in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

👋Hey, Mihail! Introduce yourself in a sentence.

Hi, I’m Mihail, a Senior Cloud Engineer at Tide, a positive person who is happy to fix your technical cloud issues for some cookies and a cup of coffee 🍪☕

What’s your background?

I’m just another tech guy in this world. Even before graduating in Computer Science, my professional journey started as an IT specialist, and then evolved into the System Administration field. A couple of years later, after tons of interesting professional challenges, here I am, part of the Cloud Engineering team at Tide.

How did you cross paths with Tide? 

Really spontaneously actually! I’ve always been interested in fintech. A couple of months ago, I saw an article saying that Tide is expanding their Cloud Engineering team in Sofia. I did some research and that convinced me that this was the next professional challenge for me.

How would you describe your journey at Tide in three words?

Interesting, dynamic, challenging

What’s your favourite aspect of your role?

As well as the planned and operational tasks, the Cloud Engineering team deals with many unexpected and complicated cases every day. These complex challenges make our jobs really awesome – especially when we’re pioneering the use of the latest technology.

What’s the most interesting challenge you’ve come across since joining Tide?

We can sit down and I’ll spend a day telling you about it. I would summarise it like this: It’s been a great rollercoaster so far and we’re still on the ride!

Name something you’re good at and known for at Tide.

Seeing as I’m a Cloud Engineer, here’s an analogy: I’m the one who fights lighting in the clouds to make the sun shine again! 

How would you explain your role to someone who isn’t familiar with your area? 

Basically, our job as Cloud Engineers is to look after Tide’s cloud: the infrastructure, the capacity and how it’s allocated, to automate the whole process and to support it.

The infrastructure is wrapped with monitoring tools, to help us keep it in good shape and last but not least, we make sure it scales properly when there are lots of Tide members all using our app at the same time 😎

Your field is constantly changing. How do you keep up?

The most important thing is to stay updated on what’s happening in the market and on the new approaches to solving different kinds of problems.

In my spare time, I love to attend a wide range of different technical training sessions for example: KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, AllDayDevOps, AWS Summit, re:INVENT, Google Cloud Next and more.

What learning resources would you recommend to aspiring cloud engineers?

Courses by A Cloud Guru. I find these courses are very detailed and close to real scenarios. Also I’d recommend: the book Terraform: Up & Running (2nd Edition), Reddit Everything DevOps and ZDNet.

Share a song that describes your work ethic.

A tough one, but let’s give it a try… Madonna, Die Another Day. It’s a cliché but a good match for my role!

What do you enjoy about living and working in Sofia?

The vibe of the city. There’s always something happening here. Also, Sofia is not just a capital of Bulgaria, but a real digital city. It’s leading the way in the IT industry in this country.

What’s your most-used emoji?

Winking face 😉

Thanks very much, Mihail! 😀

Photo courtesy of Mihail shows him not at a beautiful waterfall in Bulgaria but at Niagara Falls, USA, when he used to live and work in New Jersey.