Meet A ServiceTrader

Taylor Everhart, DevOps Specialist

Taylor is part of the Engineering team. She monitors the ServiceTrade application to make sure it’s healthy, running smoothly, and scalable.

Tell me about your ServiceTrade journey.

I started on the Customer Success team in March of 2021. I worked as a tier 1 support specialist until May, and then was promoted to tier 2 support. I was doing that until November 1st, when I transferred to Engineering as a DevOps Specialist, focusing on site reliability.

I feel like I moved really quickly. I graduated college in December 2020, so ServiceTrade has been my first job out of school. I studied Management Information Systems at University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

What do you do as the DevOps Specialist?

I’m basically setting up alarms, making sure the app is running the way it’s supposed to. I work with Graham McCullough (DevOps Engineer) to scale up as we need on the back end with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

AWS is the cloud platform we use for the ServiceTrade application, and the DevOps team manages our AWS account to ensure the reliability of the application. We use AWS tools to set up and monitor alarms to keep the application running smoothly, identify bottlenecks in performance and work on eliminating those. 

Site reliability is sort of like the middleman between our developers and the application, charged with making sure the application is healthy, running smoothly, and scaling up the resources when needed to power the app.

Moving from Support to Engineering, any advice for those looking to make a career change?

Go for it and be open minded to new opportunities. Because if I hadn’t talked to Graham and Adam Gurley (Training Support Specialist) at the ServiceTrade Days company meeting in July, I wouldn’t have considered this position. 

I told Graham and Adam about my major and how I just graduated, and they talked to me about what they do and asked me questions about what kind of things I enjoyed doing. I told them I really liked problem solving, and they made the connection for me that I might be a good fit for the DevOps Specialist role.

After ServiceTrade Days, I started shadowing Graham and worked on a few projects. From there it kind of just snowballed. I did more and more projects and then I accepted an offer to join the Engineering team.

So be open to talking to people about what you’re interested in and what you want to do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to move to Engineering.

Which of the ServiceTrade culture values is the most important to you and why?

I think probably ‘we are weird’ and ‘we gather at the table’. I like both of those because I was really nervous coming out of college and into a job. I thought it was going to be scary because I’d never really been in the workplace before.

Then I got here and everyone was just as fun as the people at college, helping each other and hyping you up. I was in my first standup for Customer Success with David Varnedoe, and he was telling some crazy story, and then I was like, “oh okay this is chiller than I thought.” 

I like how everyone can express themselves and be genuine. I don’t feel like I have to put on a “work Taylor,” I can just be myself with everyone here. We are always building each other up. It’s not like a cut-throat environment or anything. Everyone tries to help each other grow. It made me feel really welcomed and that I fit in almost immediately.

What do you enjoy doing outside of ServiceTrade?

I have a bunch of plants. So many plants. I probably have 25 plants in my house. I just keep getting them. I also go to yoga. I like to travel, though I haven’t done a lot of that. Before I joined ServiceTrade, I had never been to the West coast. Now, I’ve been to Utah and Washington, using my vacation days.

I really just do relaxing things. I love walking on the beach and watching the sun set over the Intracoastal Waterway here in Wilmington (where I live and work remotely.) I kayak sometimes, and I bring my cat with me who likes to kayak. I guess that’s a fun fact: my cat and I go kayaking together!

Fun fact: my cat and I go kayaking together!