# employee-experience Published articles for employee-experience. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## A Q&A on Site Reliability Engineering and Observability at Thumbtack DevFeed: [A Q&A on Site Reliability Engineering and Observability at Thumbtack]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Thumbtack People Team Published: 2026-02-05T18:01:47Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Thumbtack Engineering - Medium]() Topics: [site-reliability-engineering](), [observability](), [Software as a service](), [Self-hosted](), [Incident response](), [telemetry]() Tags: [careers](), [company](), [culture](), [employee-experience](), [engineering](), [growth](), [incident-response](), [observability](), [saas](), [scale](), [self-hosted](), [site-reliability](), [software-engineer](), [software-engineering](), [systems](), [technical](), [technology](), [work]() ### AI overview In this Q&A, Thumbtack Senior Software Engineer Brett Shouse discusses his site reliability engineering work, including migrating self-hosted observability services to a unified SaaS platform. He also describes addressing technical debt, improving incident response, and unifying logs, traces, and metrics. ### Source excerpt A Q&A with Brett Shouse, Senior Software Engineer.As an engineer, what drew you to Thumbtack? I joined Thumbtack in March of 2025, and from day one it's felt like the right place to grow, build, and make a real impact. I was ready for a fresh challenge and wanted to help evolve a business that truly aligned with my values. I took a very intentional approach to my search. I reviewed the career sites of 106 companies to deeply understand their cultures, and from that process I applied and interviewed with four outstanding organizations. Each had strong teams and compelling missions, but Thumbtack stood out immediately. The values resonated with me, the opportunities for growth were clear, and I could see countless ways to meaningfully contribute -- not just within site reliability engineering, but across engineering as a whole. Choosing Thumbtack felt both exciting and obvious. What work are you currently focused on? I'm currently leading work to migrate a collection of self-hosted observability services into a unified SaaS platform. This effort is reducing the ongoing burden of systems administration, application support, and alert fatigue, while also lowering costs. Most importantly, it frees up engineering time and energy so teams can focus on the projects that directly support Thumbtack's customers. It's deeply satisfying work because the benefits compound across the entire organization. How would you describe the culture of your team? Supportive, driven, and genuinely fun. My teammates are endlessly curious, highly skilled, and always learning. We love automating toil away so we can focus on meaningful, high-impact work. It's a team that pushes for excellence while lifting each other up along the way. What are some of the unique technical challenges you're solving? Tackling technical debt that naturally accumulates when a company leans in early and then grows rapidly. Defining what effective incident response means for the business and enabling fast, confident res ## A Day in the Life of Ayush Sharma, DevOps Engineer at FanCode DevFeed: [A Day in the Life of Ayush Sharma, DevOps Engineer at FanCode]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Dream Blog Published: 2025-12-24T07:59:51Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Dream11 Engineering]() Topics: [DevOps](), [Cloud](), [Linux](), [observability](), [dashboards](), [Latency](), [Security](), [Shell]() Tags: [culture](), [dashboards](), [devops](), [employee-experience](), [engineering](), [latency](), [linux](), [observability](), [security](), [sports]() ### AI overview A personal account of Ayush Sharma's work as an SDE-3 in DevOps at FanCode. The article describes his background, his transition from Linux and shell scripting to cloud-focused work, and his daily routines for monitoring systems, supporting teams, maintaining security, and helping keep streaming experiences reliable. ### Source excerpt If you're excited about building reliable, real-time experiences for millions of fans, we're hiring across FanCode. Explore open roles and come build with us. I grew up in a defence family in the same state that gave the world MS Dhoni. Sports wasn't a hobby; it was the air we breathed -- basketball on rough courts, kabaddi on dusty grounds, football and cricket wherever there was space. That mix of discipline and play shaped the way I work even today. Off the field, I was the kid who buried himself in esports matches and gadgets. Scrims taught me the value of low latency, clear comms, and decision-making under pressure. I didn't know it back then, but those instincts would later define my DevOps career. Before cloud was my day job, Linux was my playground. I fixed permissions on messy shared hosts, learned how logs speak when something's wrong, and wrote small shell scripts to make life easier. In college, I even stitched together a tiny "cloud" using a bunch of friends' laptops -- half experiment, half curiosity. Seven years later -- five of which I've spent at FanCode -- I'm here as an SDE-3 in DevOps, driven by one promise: make speed feel safe. Inside the company, my end users are the people who design, build, test, analyse, ship and secure our products. Outside, our fans just expect the stream to work. And my job is to make that seamless. How I Run My DayStart: Steadying the Field I like to ease into the day with a simple ritual: coffee in hand and a quick health sweep of the system. Before diving into any work, I read through the on-call handover to understand what unfolded overnight, not just what alerted, but how the system behaved. From there, I open our observability board and look at alerts and our key dashboards for patterns. These early clues help me understand if some team or process is blocked, or if a fan is facing an issue and address that immediately. I also go through requests from other teams -- tickets, a product experiment that needs support, a pip