Meet our Head of Technical Operations, AWS Infra & DevOps- in short, Head of DevOps, aka. David. David has exhibited exceptional performance at Storm, leading to a promotion within his first year. What tasks typically occupy his workday? Find out below.
Can you tell us about your role as Head of DevOps at Storm?
My main responsibilities are management, architecting, building, and operation of online and retail software at Storm Games. I spend the most time provisioning and maintaining our cloud-based infrastructure, ensuring our online products are highly available and secure through industry standard best practices.
I am also responsible for the architecture of many end-to-end software solutions; Designing and writing the code, constructing a product’s CI/CD pipeline, overseeing versioning and production releases, and provisioning the cloud environments for development, testing, and production environments.
How long have you been Head of DevOps for Storm?
I started as a Games Mathematician with a programming background about one year ago and brought a vision of aligning the development and management teams with a vision of Agile software development, implementing automated tooling, and migrating our products onto industry leading cloud technologies, leading to a promotion to Head of Infra DevOps in June of this year.
Where did your interest in developing games come from?
I landed myself continuously in trouble as I was always breaking my PC by taking it apart as a young teenager. I have enjoyed tinkering with computers, circuits, and code for many of my young-teen years. I remember a day when my dad dusted off his Commodore 64, and I loved the retro look and feel of the games, and being technical himself, showed me how computers of that era could be coded with peeks and pokes, BBC Basic and the like. I have loved gaming and computer programming for as long as I can remember.
What does a typical day look like as Head of DevOps at Storm?
The development team has a daily sync-up in the morning, where we discuss what we will do for the day and if we need any collaboration to get that job done. I then look at our deployment dashboards to see if any errors have been logged, and to monitor the status of our Kubernetes clusters. If there are no deployment issues that need addressing, I mostly architect and write back-end software, such as our Titanium RGS. I also work with other developers to orchestrate the different components that need to be brought together for an upcoming software release.
What characteristics do you think benefit this role?
Bearing the responsibility of the design and maintenance of Storm’s cloud software and infrastructure requires a healthy balance of theoretical knowledge and being opinionated. It is valuable to the customer and to the business to be quick and efficient in our software delivery, which is accelerated when the code uses standardised techniques, technologies, tech-stacks, and processes.
The most valuable skill, exceeding any other, is communication; Cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure are very complex, and it’s far easier to develop software when you understand the platform the application will be deployed on and how internet traffic will interact with it. Being able to effectively communicate the relevant cloud concepts to the rest of the team is a vitally important skill for any DevOps engineer or system architect.
What is your favourite part of being Head of DevOps?
I enjoy seeing our team’s software come together on newly technologies and infrastructure and looking at the usage statistics when the software or software updates are promoted to production. It provides great job satisfaction seeing all the work put in, the collaboration in Jira, and the architecture of the software and infrastructure provide good gaming experiences.
What challenges do you face as Head of DevOps?
The biggest challenges are architecting software and infrastructure that is secure, performant, and in the case of our API services, intuitive and pain-free to integration with.
I often start with brainstorming the high-level components and then try it out by writing some very basic code and seeing if it feels nice to work in and has a logical structure. I would iterate this process until I find an architecture that is maximally adaptable and intuitive to work in, allowing developers to rapidly implement new functionality that is stable, which in turn provides confidence to our customers.
Finally, what is your favourite game of Storm’s?
Alchemy is my favourite. I think the alchemical theme appeals to my nerdy side.
Do you think you’ve got what it takes to join Storm Games?
We are always on the look out for enthusiastic, hard-working and friendly employees to join our ever-growing team! Whether you are a developer, engineer, artist, reach out!
Email over your CV to megansheldon@stormgt.co.uk, we look forward to hearing from you.
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