Systems Engineer at Transportation Insight

Who says the friends you make playing video games can’t level up your career?

I received a random call from a friend in the middle of my workday one summer afternoon. I was working for an IT outsourcing company and a bit stalled in my career progression. What I expected to be a quick chat, and for us to catch up after work ended up catching me off-guard: “Hey, I’m working for this company out in North Carolina, and I’m building a team. I’d like for you to join. What do you say?”

Originally hired as a Data Engineer, I helped build the company’s first big data platform and developed the hosting platform for a real-time logistics analytics application called “Insight Fusion.” Insight Fusion was launched atop AWS after struggling to get reasonable performance out of the existing hosting and cloud platforms currently in use by the company. The data science platform was built atop SuperMicro servers, VMWare vSphere and Microsoft Storage Spaces, which allowed me to make a high-performance, low-cost general purpose computing platform that could be retooled quickly to adapt to different workloads.

After a year into my time at TI, with a successful launch of Insight Fusion and the hosting platform for future data projects well underway, I transitioned from Data Engineer to Systems Engineer. My responsibilities expanded to include supporting and upgrading all of Transportation Insight’s server and networking infrastructure. This included onboarding Docker containers as the deployment artifact for the company’s new line-of-business application, leveraging Ansible for configuration management and deployment, and revamping our existing IT hosting stack while also integrating the infrastructure acquired during mergers and acquisitions.