1. What attracted you to working at Cutover? How did you get involved?
I was put in touch with the CEO Ky Nichol by a former colleague at Barclays, who was then Cutover’s Head of Financial Services Business Development. I found the product very compelling, particularly as I could see how useful it would have been for a project I had recently been working on. Ky and I had various discussions about some of the areas that Cutover wanted to mature in and I felt I would be able to offer a lot based on my experience but also learn lots. Most importantly, I loved the culture at Cutover, which really shone through with everyone I met!
2. What are the main responsibilities of your role?
As Director of Engineering, I’ve led a lot of work around scaling and growing the Engineering team at Cutover. My current focus is building our internal platform capabilities—how we make it easy for the team to develop, test and ship change confidently.
3. What are you most excited about at Cutover in the coming months?
I’m really excited by some of the work we’re doing around how Cutover can be used to respond to things that go wrong. We’ve delivered a lot of value for executing planned work, where most things are known up front, but we see similar problems around communication and observability during incidents and outages and I’m looking forward to expanding and using these capabilities!
4. What has been your biggest challenge?
We’ve got such a huge opportunity and even as we scale and grow (which is a challenge in itself) it’s often tricky to decide what not to do as much as it is deciding what we do work on. I’m sure that’ll continue to be a challenge!
5. What’s one thing that surprised you about working at Cutover?
Our growth as a company and team has been really interesting. I think we’d only hired one person without meeting them face-to-face before the pandemic, but we’ve been able to more than double the size of the team whilst fully remote and I think the experience has been good overall!
6. Resilience is important from both an operational and personal perspective. What does resilience mean to you?
For me it’s about dealing with the unexpected. Often that’s about being prepared, but it’s also about having mechanisms to deal with things you’re not prepared for. The pandemic has disrupted a lot, and I’ve found that being able to find new mechanisms and ways of dealing with things has been really important—almost another layer of resilience!
7. The past year or so has created a lot of challenges, but is there anything new from the last year that you would like to keep?
Perhaps unusually, Zoom. In the past the people I spent the most time with tended to be the friends and family who were reasonably physically close. It being easier and more normal to catch up regularly with friends and family around the country and around the world has been great, and it’s something I’m looking forward to continuing to do.
Our team is still growing - take a look at our open roles including Full Stack Engineer, Integrations Engineer, Junior Cloud Engineer and more!