WHOIS … Simona Orlandi?

WHOIS…? is a format in our tech blog where we present you the many faces of our tech community. These are the people, that work every day on our state-of-the-art technical solutions to make BurdaForward so unique.

We're excited to present once again a valued member of our tech community who took the time to answer our questions and give us insights into his daily work: Simona Orlandi.

What’s your name & what techie cliché is totally true for you? 

Hi, my name is Simona Orlandi and the only techie cliché I fulfill – and only started doing so recently – is that I really prefer dark mode to bright screens… A LOT. 

What is your role at BurdaForward? 

I work as a Director for / in our amazing Tech Operations team. 

What do you do as Director? 

My job is to develop the team and its members to their fullest potential. I also have a say in the team’s mission, strategy and roadmaps ;)   

What is the job of your team at BurdaForward? 

My team, Tech Operations, centrally develops and maintains pieces of technology that are equally needed by most / all of the decentralized development teams. Those include our AWS Landing Zone and ready-to-use Infrastructure-as-Code modules as well as our CDN Akamai as well as necessary tools for development teams such as Gitlab, GitHub Co-Pilot or Jira and Confluence. 

When & Why did you start to work in tech? 

I started working in tech in October 2019. I changed careers from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to technical Project Management. Why did I do that? I guess my boss at the time inspired me. Even though he was the Head of SEO back then, he was a real techie at heart. And he taught me a lot of stuff about “the internet”. I got curious and wanted to learn more – and so I applied for the vacant position as a technical project manager at the BurdaForward operations team – which is still my team to this date.

What is your favorite part about working in tech? 

That I learn something new every day and that the field keeps evolving, it never stagnates. Also, it gives me the opportunity to have a team event including a ball pit (Techies love ball pits!)

What is your “tech superpower”? 

I guess my tech superpower is not being a native techie! That has the advantage that I am never scared of asking “stupid” questions which in the end turn out not to be that stupid after all. Also, it makes it easy for me to see the big picture and not get lost in the details.

And how did you use it recently?  

I am using it all the time. For example, in our current Kubernetes project. A few words about the projects: We are setting up Kubernetes clusters that shall be totally cloud agnostic and centrally managed by us (Tech operations). Dev Teams who decide to let their applications run inside these clusters will be able to delegate all classic “infrastructure work” to us – which is a big advantage for some of our Dev teams. We are still covering some basics, whereas the project team sometimes wants to jump right into the details already. That’s when I intervene and get them back on track for now.

What advice would you like to give techies out there? 

An advice that I would give to tech teams: Look out for people with diverse backgrounds, personalities and work preferences. You can have 5 of the best techies in the world – if they can’t / don’t want to do project management, process management and “marketing” to some extent, if they all want to do greenfield work and not close projects, the team won’t be successful.

Did you find any nice tool/software/technology/… recently that you would like to share? 

Yes, Alfy! A cute slack integration that assigns a random team mate to you for a coffee call. It also helps with scheduling and finding a small talk topic, which I assume is very nice for introverted people. This really helps to bring the team members closer together which is so important if you have a distributed team – my team for example consists out of 24 individuals working in 5 different locations.

Can we find out more about you on social platforms (LinkedIn, GitHub, Tech Blogs, Link to an article on our post…)? 

From time to time I will write an article for the BurdaForward Tech Blog (right here!), but you will find me more active on LinkedIn, where I post about balancing family and work life as a young(ish) female leader in the male-dominated sector of tech.

Any famous last words? 

Pineapple doesn’t belong on Pizza… did Antonello already mention that in his “WHO IS…?”-Interview? :D