What’s your name and what do you do at Liberis and where in the world do you work?

My name is Louis Russell, not French myself but do love the language and I am re-learning it again at the moment 😊. Within Liberis I am an Engineering Manager in the Implementation Team focusing on Partner Integrations into the Platform. I work remotely and am based in the countryside city of Hereford in the Midlands of the UK.

From the moment you wake up in the morning, what do you look forward to for the day ahead?

Coffee ☕, Always coffee from the moment I wake up 😊. Joking aside, I look forward to working with the whole Liberis team to solve problems and challenges in the business. Although my focus is my team and roadmap, I thoroughly enjoy helping everyone across the business. Whether that be just signposting, answering a question, or taking an issue forward to resolution. I thrive on challenges and getting to the bottom of them and resolved. Within my first few weeks at Liberis, I was putting in extra time to help with our Barclaycard integration and joining calls with the Barclays team in India to understand all the technical detail of our secure integration with them and how we could work together to get it resolved and delivered to Production.

Describe a typical day for you in your role.

Depending on where we are in the sprint cycle, I will have meetings with the team concerning what we are working on for the next 2 weeks, how the past 2 weeks have been going, or what work is coming up and if we know enough information to size the work and bring it into a future sprint of work. Outside of this there will be other meetings such as with Architecture or other engineering managers around upcoming work and technical detail, one to ones with my team, etc. Where I have time, I will be completing Code Reviews for my team, delving into the technical detail on changes, and where possible get my hands dirty doing some coding and changes for our team’s delivery.

What do you love most about your job?

The People. I really enjoy delving into the technical and understanding how the systems tick but without great people around you it wouldn’t be quite as enjoyable. Everyone in Liberis are all pulling in the same direction and want to do a good job whilst also having fun. They all have time for you and want to do a good job. They are also all active in the Social Channels and I am so pleased with how active the music lovers’ channel I set-up is and all the great suggestions that have been added already. Currently 311 songs totalling 23hrs & 1 minute 😲

What advice would you give a colleague whose just joined your team?

Be yourself and don’t worry about needing to know everything. Everyone is always learning and can’t know everything. Ask for help, don’t be too proud, no one is going to shoot you down or judge you because they will probably be asking for your help at some point too.

Are you office based, remote or hybrid? What are the pros and cons, if any?

I am remote based however I have been to the Nottingham and London Office twice each.

Cons would be that you miss out on the social interactions of being able to just grab a coffee or lunch with someone however in general everyone is available online for a message or a call and the social channels help keep those friendly conversations going.

Pros are that you can fit home commitments around your work with ease. You don’t need to worry about someone being in for deliveries, you can easily get washing loads done around your workday, and traffic is a thing of the past! Also, with a good desk set-up, coffee is always to hand.