Silvia and Lewis have been promoted!

Fernando Álvarez ✨ FYI

Hey everyone!


I'm excited to share some great news: Silvia has been promoted to Lead SRE (L4) and Lewis to Senior SRE (L3)!


Silvia joined us back in October 2020 as a Senior SRE, and over the past six years she's become the person you can hand just about anything to (networking, server management, failovers, mail, you name it) and know it'll be in good hands. She's one of the most reliable sentinels guarding our Ops fort, always there for on-call and reactive work. I'm not sure how she does it, but she's always the first one catching a new incident!


Her recent work on the new San Jose datacenter, where she led the project and drove it forward, made it clear she was more than ready to step up as a Lead. Personally, I really appreciate her as she's kind, empathetic, and genuinely easy to talk to and work with. A well-earned promotion after almost six years of hard work!


Lewis started on the SIP team in September 2021 as a Programmer, but over time his work and interests kept pivoting in a more SRE direction. That was a perfect fit for us: Nathan left and we needed a hand with the BC4 migration to Kamal, so in August 2024 he officially joined us as an SRE. He's been a crucial part of the team ever since, an expert in logging, monitoring, metrics, and security, and he has already contributed very relevant new work: a new search mechanism for HEY, a new logging pipeline, and Upright, a new open-source monitoring system that replaces Pingdom, just to mention a few.


He picked up the SRE duties remarkably quickly and consistently delivers great work on-call. I admire his perseverance in getting better in the new role and improving the team along the way. Plus, it's always fun to spend time with him at the meetups, so we should keep him at all costs!


So let's celebrate with Silvia and Lewis on their well-deserved promotions! 🍾

Kevin McConnell
Kevin McConnell Principal Programmer, Product

I always feel a bit indebted to Silvia because almost every time I've needed a bit of ops help, she seems to be there and responds almost immediately. And either she already knows the answer (which is often!) or if it's a new mystery she dives right in to figure it out. It's super impressive, and it makes the programming side go so much smoother when you have such skillful help to call on when you need it 🙏🙏


Also wanted to call out Lewis 's help on a number of kamal-proxy-related items recently. There's been a few times he has noticed a better way to do something, or thought of a missing feature that would let us simplify something in our setup. Always good ideas, and as well as clearly communicating what they are, he often shows up with a PR of the solution all ready to go 🙏🙏


Huge congrats to both, it's so well-deserved!

Alex Williams
Alex Williams Senior SRE, Ops Edited

Yessss!! Congratulations Silvia and Lewis you absolutely deserve the titles 🎉.


I think half my browser bookmarks link back to something Silvia wrote/published, and her problem-solving skills are unbelievable.

Lewis has always been Senior in my mind, considering his skills/expertise and how much he’s taught me since I joined. I greatly appreciate being able to work with them daily. ❤️

Rosa Gutiérrez
Rosa Gutiérrez Programmer, SIP 👩🏻‍💻

Lewis , Silvia , this is so deserved! I feel super lucky to have you as workmates and friends 🥰 Love working and hanging out with you.

Farah Schüller
Farah Schüller Senior SRE, Ops 🌸

I have the privilege to work with both of them on my team on a daily basis ♥️, and I'd like to highlight how they aren't just incredible engineers on their own path.


Silvia is there with patience whenever I have a question. She checks in with me regularly and is a caring, empathetic but also level-headed and grounded person that I radiate towards to calm down with whenever we meet. Thank you 🙇‍♀️♥️


Lewis has looked out for me on several occasions, cheered me up before I realized I needed cheering up, and has been a great listener and enthusiastic conversation partner for deeper topics as well. Thank you as well 🙇‍♀️♥️


Your promotions are both super deserved and I am super happy for you both 🎉

Eron Nicholson
Eron Nicholson Director of Ops

Congratulations to both of you on these very well deserved promotions! 🎉🍾🥂


Silvia is such a bedrock member of the team that it's tough to remember life in Ops before she joined. She is always on top of things, watches our systems like a hawk and just goes out and fixes problems. She is always willing to jump in the trenches and work through long projects with impressive diligence and stamina. Whether it's the kvm-v2 rollout, linux upgrades or the San Jose Outpost, you know she's going to be there delivering super high quality work.


Lewis joining Ops from SIP sorta felt like cheating. He brings a different skill set and background than a lot of us on the team and has really helped us level up our tools and processes. He has such a deep knowledge of rails and our applications which has proved critical in both cycle work and incident response. His recent work on Upright, Loki and ElasticSearch performance have been exemplary.


We are incredibly lucky to have both of you on the team. Thank you for all that you do. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻