1. What does a typical day look like for a DevOps/SRE Engineer?
My day starts around 8am with coffee and a look at overnight alerts and pipeline runs. By 9am I'm in stand-up with the client's engineering team, usually over video, syncing on what's deploying that day and any incidents from the night before.
Mid-morning is when I do my deepest work: writing Terraform modules, tuning Kubernetes manifests, or digging into Prometheus dashboards to understand a latency spike. I try to protect this block since it overlaps with when Montevideo is quiet but the US team is just getting started, so I can work heads-down before requests start coming in.
Afternoons are for client syncs, code reviews, and pairing with other engineers on GitLab CI pipelines. I also spend time documenting runbooks, since good documentation is what lets someone else fix an issue at 2am without calling me.
End of day, I check that nothing is deploying unattended, review any open pull requests, and leave notes for the next person picking up the thread, whether that's a teammate or the client's own team.
2. What do you like most about working for Bydrec?
I like that Bydrec treats us as engineers embedded in the client's team, not as an outsourced function. I'm in the same Slack channels, the same incident calls, the same planning sessions as the client's own staff. That access makes the work better because I understand the why behind a request, not just the ticket. Bydrec also gives me room to suggest architecture changes instead of just executing tasks, which is rare in this kind of role.
3. A project you are proud of
A client's deployment process involved six hours of manual steps: building images by hand, running database migrations one at a time, and manually verifying each service before moving to the next. I redesigned the pipeline in GitLab CI with staged rollouts on Kubernetes, automated health checks using Prometheus metrics, and automatic rollback if error rates crossed a threshold. The same deployment now finishes in under twelve minutes, with no one needing to babysit it. What I'm most proud of is that the rollback logic has actually triggered a few times in production and done exactly what it was supposed to, quietly, without a war room.
4. Advice for engineers joining a US team from Uruguay
- Over-communicate early. Written updates in Slack or tickets matter more than they would in person, since there's no hallway conversation to fill gaps.
- Learn the client's business, not just their stack. Knowing why a service matters changes how you prioritize incidents.
- Protect your focus time, but be flexible around the 1-2 hour overlap window that matters most for syncs.
- Ask questions when a requirement is unclear instead of guessing. Time zone gaps make back-and-forth slower, so clarity upfront saves a full day sometimes.
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