Henry Sinclair is a Senior Team Manager within Allstate NI's Data & Intelligent Systems (DIS) and has been with the company for over 7 years. At present, he works within the DIS Database Space and has delivery responsibility for reliability engineering across DIS Database Platforms. Henry also has another manager reporting to him in relation to Database Security and part of this role is to help drive the Database Security and Step Change initiatives.
The Reliability Engineering team is a new team that was formed in early 2020. This came out of a vision Henry had to help drive reliability within the Database Ecosystem. At present the team is working on centralised database logging alerts, metrics and events to provide a centralised location and understanding of what is going on within our platforms. This positively impacts the wider company ensuring that the DBA space is focusing on high value add work, automating as much as possible, and in the long-term using artificial intelligence and machine learning to scale the company's operations and how we do things.
In Henry's own words,
"My favorite thing in my current role at Allstate is having the ability to come up with a new vision and ideas and be able to drive them forward. Not many jobs would allow you this much scope."
One of the most interesting projects recently for the team has been building out a performance dashboard for SQL Server. This challenged the team to use technologies that they had not used before and was a great learning opportunity for them to develop new skills. As with all change, the team faced challenges from those resistant to change and wanting to use vendor specific technology. However, they overcame this and now have a solution that can be moved across technology stacks if required.
At present the tech stack is using the following technologies; Python, SQL Server and Oracle, Powershell and Bash Scripting, and Splunk. This will grow over time and start to include other key technologies as the team requires them.
Working as part of DIS provides you with the opportunity, as with many business areas in Allstate, to work closely with other areas to collaborate and share ideas which allows us to learn from each other and improve the way we do things.
"Allstate has afforded me many opportunities to drive my career forward since I initially joined in 2012. I have also been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to travel within Europe and America to attend and present at various conferences. The highlight being the Amazon Web Services (AWS) RE:Invent conference in Las Vegas at which I was one of the speakers. I'm grateful to work for a company that supports and encourages me to develop my career!"
