Meet Me in 5 (Questions): Zach Howe

Nov 16, 2022

Welcome to Autonomic’s Meet Me in 5 (Questions) series where we feature the passionate individuals who inspire our work. We met with Zach Howe, Production Operations Engineer, to learn about his role and how it has grown since starting at Autonomic. Zach has taken on several different positions since joining our team in 2020. He works hard to optimize company processes and make life easier for our teams.

1. What is your role at Autonomic and what does your day-to-day look like?

I am a Production Engineer. My day-to-day consists of developing applications and services that help automate company processes or make them more efficient. I also handle alerts for various team’s services to reduce the number of interruptions they receive throughout the day.

2. Let’s talk about career growth. Did you start out as a Production Engineer?

When I first joined Autonomic, I actually started out as a Technical Support agent. My primary role was helping customers navigate our platform. With the support of my team, I was able to take on new responsibilities, and a short time later I moved into a Customer Support Engineer role, where I worked on developing solutions to help maximize efficiency for our Technical Support team. I continued to grow in that role for about a year, then I transitioned to the Production Engineering team.

3. How were you able to achieve so much growth in your time at Autonomic?

I think the support of my manager and teammates helped a lot. I’m surrounded by very smart, skilled people, and I was able to learn a lot from them. In addition, since Autonomic is growing so quickly, there are plenty of opportunities for new ideas and responsibilities. You aren’t tied to a specific set of tasks for too long. I made sure to step up when the need arose.

4. What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on lately?

Lately I’ve been working on developing a tool that will help us replace our current command line tool with a web hosted application. Several teams across our organization have been running the command line tool locally for years, so this will help streamline many of their tasks.

5. How would you describe the culture at Autonomic?

I would describe the culture at Autonomic as somewhere between a startup and a well-established company. There is a lot of room for growth and new ideas are encouraged, but you don’t have to worry about the next round of funding coming through, so there is a level of stability that might not exist at a startup. Autonomic also cultivates a very supportive environment. The people I work with are always willing to help when needed.