Join us each month for a series highlighting the unique career journey of our employees.
This month, we talk to a Technical Lead.
1. When did you start with Centric? Tell me about your career path (prior to coming to Centric).
I joined on Monday, February 27, 2017 as the Tech Lead for the Boston office.
Prior to joining Centric, I worked as a Principal Consultant at another local consulting firm. I came to the US in October 2012, and since then I’ve been working in different industries such as entertainment, insurance, state agencies and publishing.
Actually, much of my experience has been in the publishing industry, where I worked closely with different publishers and journals to help with major integrations and cloud migrations. I did this for almost five years.
2. How did you end up in consulting?
It was purely accidental. Back in 2005, I joined my first consulting firm, working on a project at a local bank.
I quickly realized that consulting exposes you to a little bit of everything and you can work on projects that are using the latest technologies, or you can propose and lead them once you reach the Architect level.
I also learned that being in consulting allows you to be on top of the latest technology trends, allowing you to constantly re-invent yourself. Not only does this benefit you as an individual, but also your company, and most importantly, your team members because you can teach and coach them on why a certain technology is better suited than another.
3. If you had to pinpoint a definitive moment in your career, what would that be?
Moving to the US has served as a major juncture in my professional and personal life, helping lead me down the path to achieve my goals.
Joining Centric has also been a key moment for me. It’s given me the opportunity to explore different technology trends, improve my business development skills, and virtually meet and work with architects from our offices across the country.
It’s amazing the synergy the entire company has. If you ever wonder about a certain topic, you can simply email other architects your question, and almost immediately you’ll receive responses from different people – some of them that you’ve probably never met before! Hopefully I’ll get to meet everyone at some point, but it’s been an amazing, collaborative experience so far, and I’ve never seen anything similar in past companies.
4. How does your current role fit into your career path/goals?
Becoming the Tech Lead of the Boston office is boosting my career tremendously. Since I joined Centric a few months ago, I’ve had nothing but the best experiences, and I’ve gotten great suggestions from the team on how to get more engaged in the tech community to the extent that I got the opportunity to be one of the speakers at a recent Global Azure Bootcamp!
My main goal is to establish Centric Boston as the best of the best at the technical level, not only delivering projects on time and within budget, but also delivering high-quality products that align with the client’s vision and mission as well as support their growth.
5. What are some unique, funny or interesting stories you can share about your career journey?
In 2011, during one of my trips to Dover, NH, I got the opportunity to become the Tech Lead of a major implementation for the education industry. This implementation consisted of managing resources from several places around the world like Peru, Costa Rica, India and United States.
The project had several challenges from the implementation and management perspective. From the implementation perspective, I proposed a major refactor of the initial code base, this refactor led to performance improvements and to the inclusion of new processes such as code review and continuous integration.
It also contributed to a new development methodology called TREDD (Test Requirement Driven Development), which reduced the number of bugs found by the QA team to about a 25 percent.
Managing people across countries and time zones was a challenge as well, but we got around that by scheduling meetings and work assignments so the project was in development mode for about 16 to 20 hours during the day.
Personally, this project was one of the most rewarding ones because it led to the implementation of an online assessment for kids with varying abilities. Applying my technology skills to help people was one of the most rewarding experiences I ever had.
6. What motivates your career and drives you to keep going?
Mentoring and teaching my team members is my main driver. I was lucky that at the beginning of my professional career, two Microsoft Trainers were my mentors, and the energy they put into every code review session established the foundation for me to do the same throughout my career.
A team whose level increases during a project equals a happy team, and a happy team means a successful project almost like an equation: Sp = Tk + Th => (SuccessfulProject = TeamKnowledge + TeamHappiness).
7. Please describe consulting at Centric. What is this job like? Describe what your typical day looks like.
Every day is a new adventure, and currently I’m assigned to a client where we’re doing a major system migration.
Our role is to lead the design and implementation of a new cloud infrastructure, migrating their existing on-prem servers to PaaS and microservices.
The migration process consists on upgrading legacy applications to the latest .NET Framework, which will be deployed into Azure using Azure SQL, App Services, App Service Environments. That will enable VNets to configure Private and Public networks and load balancers. This new infrastructure accounts for horizontal and vertical scalability, which is aligned to support future company growth.
I’m also working on business development tasks such as making more connections in the technology community, attending different technical events, and speaking at some of them.
8. What did your recruiting process look like? Did you find Centric, or did we find you?
I was contacted via LinkedIn by a Technical recruiter, we exchanged a few messages before our phone conversation.
Timing was not optimal at the beginning but we kept in touch until the right role came up. Once the role I sought became available, I started to have additional interviews, all of which were extremely pleasant. Everyone was knowledgeable and friendly, and I had an amazing experience.
9. Is your practice currently hiring? Or, is the company currently hiring for roles like yours? If so, what positions are open?
We have different openings for various projects. Here are some of the positions open at this time:
- DevOps
- Angular2 & Typescript
- .NET
- Java Developers
- Technical Project Managers
And soon we’ll be expanding to IoT and Machine Learning, including cognitive services and speech recognition. To learn more, visit our Careers Page.
10. What mix of skills, personality, and values do you find most important for a consulting role like yours?
When you manage people, you must realize that every single resource on your team is entirely different, and so you must know how to best approach each team member to help them become a better resource.
So, I’d say that you need to be an analytical person and one that leads by example – reading and learning is a fundamental piece that allows teaching and mentoring your team members with concrete examples.
11. Given that Centric values work-life balance, please share some of your hobbies or special interests outside of work.
I’m a father of two beautiful daughters, and I enjoy spending time with them once I get home.
We enjoy riding our bikes – weather permitting – and over the weekends I love cooking Peruvian food, which is my best therapy for any stress!