Meet Jessica Mckinnie, a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Indeed. A rare native of Austin, TX. She focuses on the reliability of Indeed.com and manages access control for systems between users and employers. She has a background in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from Iowa State University and has been in the industry for 13 years, primarily as a Software Engineer at various companies, mostly startups. For fun, she makes artwork and does powerlifting competitively.
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She shares her journey to Indeed and offers advice to those looking to get their foot in the door.
I was an unpopular person in school, so I spent a lot of time reading. I discovered the internet in 1994: a place where I can read information about whatever I could think of and talk to people across the country and the world. I became interested in how it works and I was lucky enough to have people in my life support my interests. I studied computer engineering and mathematics in college intending to continue to study applied math after getting my undergraduate degree, but I burned out of school hard.
Finding my passion in SRE
I tried many types of roles: QA, full-stack web developer, backend engineer, etc. Over time, I decided that I don’t like identifying issues and not being able to fix them myself. I prefer not to work with browsers. I don’t like being part of a feature factory, especially when I can’t empathize with the customer. What remains is Operations work (meaning sysadmin work) or Infrastructure/platform work – like SRE. That’s why I am here now.
A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is a software engineering approach towards solving operations (systems administration, etc) problems. SRE at Indeed focuses on evangelizing processes and code changes that improve our ability to run services that operate as performantly and reliably as possible. We also provide a 24/7 follow-the-sun general on-call service for highly important services. My passion is internal developer tooling. I like helping people do their job without having to think hard about what runs underneath it.
The team I support works on a set of services that provide role-based authentication control (RBAC) for Indeed’s employer users. It’s used by every employer-facing service to determine whether a particular user is authorized to perform an action. The best thing about being on the SRE team is I work with a lot of very talented engineers on hard problems that regular software engineers don’t want to think about. The information transfer is amazing and I get to help.
The biggest obstacle is dealing with my own personality traits and imposter syndrome. Software engineers value relatively loud, opinionated voices. I am relatively quiet and insecure about possibly being wrong, especially in large groups. It’s hard to get over that; it requires conscious thought. I feel like I would be further in my career if I was comfortable speaking in larger groups. I’m working on it. I’m deliberately putting myself in situations where I have to speak to larger groups of technical people. It is still harrowing but necessary.
Why I belong at Indeed
I have to say the work-life balance here at Indeed is amazing. Indeed has provided me with all of the basic equipment to work from home, including dual monitors, an awesome laptop docking station, an additional camera, etc. They’ve also given a few WFHs stipends so I could purchase additional items to improve my work from home experience, like an exercise bike to put under my desk so I can pedal while working. Indeed also has provided AWS training, Kubernetes training, as well as access to self-guided training for other engineering topics.
I feel I belong at Indeed because I am nearly always treated with respect. When I am not treated with respect, my direct manager handles it for me and validates my point of view. My management chain is definitely dedicated to Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, and asks for my perspective on related issues regularly. I want to be known as a resource to help enable engineers with programming language questions, architecture questions, troubleshooting, even networking. I want people to feel free to ask me questions or for advice.
What I love is that Indeed does not tell you to stay in your lane; as long as you are meeting expectations, you can work on whatever you want (other teams, other organizations, etc). You should come work at Indeed because of our powerful mission. I work with smart people on large-scale problems. I look for growth opportunities — how can I stretch? Learn new tech, meet new people, work on a larger scope, mentor, etc.
Advice from Jessica
Try to surround yourself with other motivated people. Complacency is contagious. Also, try not to get “comfortable” in a role — switch it up. Work with different tech, work at different scales, etc.
Network. Knowing people can really open up new opportunities. Sometimes people even come to you with opportunities instead of having to go to them. The best way to get new jobs is to know someone on the inside already that can vouch for your track record. I actually got 3 of my jobs through referrals versus cold applications or recruiters.
Find a sponsor: someone who will champion you and intentionally look for opportunities for you. This could be your direct manager, a skip level, or even someone in a completely different part of the organization.
We’re hiring! Check out all of our open Site Reliability Engineering roles #insideindeed.
