Uncensored Discourse: Detailed Account
Lena Schöngurg, a seasoned engineer based near Aachen in Germany, is a key member of the Camunda team. With a career spanning years, Lena has honed her skills in various areas, including developing algorithms, system administration, and Kubernetes, under the guidance of a mentor.
Lena's professional journey began in a small company where she delved into natural language processing. Today, she works at Camunda, a company that specialises in automating complex business processes.
Camunda's engineering culture is defined by a low-ego environment that values high technical competency. Transparency, integrity, and even a touch of humour are some of the core values that the team upholds. The company encourages access to senior leadership and fosters team building through regular retreats. Camunda's culture is inclusive and empowering, promoting diversity and equal opportunity.
Senior engineers at Camunda are expected to be experienced leaders in Business Process Management (BPM) technologies and cloud-native solution design, with mentoring abilities. They are tasked with leading architecture and design efforts, mentoring junior developers, managing scalable and high-availability Camunda platforms, collaborating closely with business and technical stakeholders, and improving processes using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Skills in AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes (EKS), and exploration of AI-enhanced BPM solutions are highly valued.
However, some employee reviews suggest challenges with product quality, management experience, and career progression or equity incentives outside senior leadership, which may impact the work environment.
In her role at Camunda, Lena works in the Distributed Systems & Performance team, handling challenges in distributed systems, long-running workflows, event-driven architecture, and scale across multiple cloud environments. Good observability is crucial in distributed systems for Lena, and she uses deterministic property tests and simulations for debugging. The Java Flight Recorder (JFR) is a tool she finds useful for performance monitoring and troubleshooting problems.
When everything else fails, Lena's favourite debugging tool or approach is a pen, paper, and a long walk.
Lena advises potential Camunda employees to imagine being their own user and find simple and elegant solutions. She was approached by a recruiter and joined Camunda after watching tech talks and reading publicly available code.
In her personal life, Lena is renovating and rebuilding a 100-year-old house. After one and a half years of work, she and her partner are getting closer to moving into their newly renovated home. Lena's favourite programming language is Clojure, and functional programming and data-oriented programming are powerful tools for her as an engineer.
The "Meet a Camundi" series spotlights the engineers behind the platform, and Lena is one of them. Despite the challenges, Lena is excited about the challenge of creating systems that "just work" and become invisible in the chaos of software development.
Lena Schöngurg, a seasoned engineer at Camunda, utilizes skills in Kubernetes, a technology she honed during her career, to handle challenges in distributed systems. In her work at Camunda, she is expected to be experienced in Business Process Management (BPM) technologies and cloud-native solution design.
Lena's advice to potential Camunda employees is to find simple and elegant solutions, just as she did when she joined the company after watching tech talks and reading publicly available code.
