Snowplow Spotlight: Yulia Golova

Yulia Golova – Support engineer based in Portugal

1. What do you do at Snowplow?

I’m a Support Engineer and part of a team that provides assistance to our Snowplow users. Mostly my job involves answering technical or practical questions, monitoring our client’s batch pipelines, adjusting them, and providing guidance through recovery processes. We also try to make sure that once initial set up is complete, our users feel comfortable to explore many more additional Snowplow features. This means that we also provide a communication channel between our users and our other teams within Snowplow and make sure that we deliver feedback from both sides.

2. Why did you decide to go into support engineering?

After I finished university, I decided to go into software engineering first. I was excited about the number of opportunities, challenges and flexibility this field gives you. Later, once I’ve started working more closely with my company’s clients, I thought that I’d like to explore this field further and became a support engineer. I found such an opportunity in Snowplow and it’s been a great experience so far.

3. What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Working closely with users of our product, helping them with exploring new features and resolving problems they encounter. There is a lot of opportunities to learn something new and we have a strong team that can help with that.

4. What do you find the most challenging?

We always have to be clear in our communication, be as detailed as possible and remember that if something became obvious for us after working closely with the product, it’s not exactly obvious for our users.

5. What was the first job you ever wanted to have?

I think it was veterinarian and at one point I thought that driving a truck that waters flowers along the road at night was pretty neat.

6. How do you find working for a company with such geographically distributed teams

I always enjoyed working remotely and one of the reasons is because I have an opportunity to work and meet with a lot of people from different parts of the world. Of course it comes with its challenges, but if you have a strong team that constantly works on improving its communication everything works out in a best way. I can work from a different country, travel and still feel as part of a team.

7. What do you like to spend time doing when you’re not at work?

I enjoy photography, hiking with my dog, reading popular (and not so popular) science books and a little bit of guitar playing.

8. What are 3 things still left on your bucket list?

I really want to go to New Zealand one day, also I’d like to learn how to sail and go on an expedition to see whales. But I expect I will have more things on my list once I do this.