Thursday, September 21, 2017

Meet the Team: Victor Tuson Palau


The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts

Victor is the Director of Engineering, and works from our Sevilla Office.

A brief bio

I was born and raised in Barcelona. Growing up, I was always keen to learn about how things worked. My interest was equally divided between technology and nature. So much so, that the decision to do engineering came a few days before submitting my university choices. I set Computer Networks as first choice, followed by Veterinary Medicine as second. Luckily for the animal kingdom, I got my first choice.

Another of my passions is learning new cultures, so to complete my final-year degree project, I moved to England for 6 months… long-story short: I stayed there for 17 years, married an English woman and had two kids. In between, my wife and I managed to fit in 18 months living and working in India. 

Enjoying some outdoor time with the family
I soon discovered that although I liked engineering, I really loved working with engineers and helping them build awesome products. Over the years, I worked in the mobile phone industry (Nortel,Symbian and Nokia) before moving towards Open Source.

Before Bitnami, I was the Vice President of Customer Engineering at Canonical, helping our commercial partners to build and ship Ubuntu products.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

Serverless, Containers and Kubernetes - these are three technologies that are changing the landscape of cloud computing. Bitnami is doing amazing work to bring our highly successful one-click-deployment developer offering from our installers and cloud instances to them. That was what got me talking to Bitnami.

It was meeting the fantastic engineering team in Seville that convinced me to jump on a plane and move to the South of Spain with my family. I am extremely lucky to cycle to the office every day through a city packed with Unesco World Heritage sites, and come to work in a start up packed with world-class professionals, both in our offices in Seville, San Francisco, and our remotely located colleagues. It also doesn't hurt having two very talented founders at the helm of the company! They provide a very crisp and exciting vision for our business and technology.

What are you working on?

As Director of Engineering, my role is to support the team in shipping products and becoming more efficient in the process.

For example, we have just added 4 new database multi-VM cluster solutions to our catalog. We are able to keep growing our catalog by investing in automation and improvements every iteration. Often, the most valuable feedback comes from our community forums and we make sure we help everyone who has a question.

The most important asset in Bitnami are our people; right now I am working with our Director of Operations to roll out improved practices in order to support engineers continuous learning and growth. With these programs, we focus on product, project and people skills and depending on their career choice, we help them achieve the right balance between the three.

I spend a large part of my time on our selection process. We are growing! Hiring the right people to enrich the team’s culture and skills is very important to me. We are looking for engineers for our assets (packaging and CI automation), tools development (golang), and Kubernetes teams.

What do you like to do for fun?

I just moved to Seville, so a lot of my spare time is spent wandering about Seville, visiting places and trying out new restaurants with friends. When it gets too hot, I have fun with my kids in the local pool!

Interested in working with Bitnami and Victor? Apply for one of our open positions!