Dima grew up and studied in Egypt. She obtained her Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the Cairo University in Egypt, before joining the Government’s Information Technology Institute to refine her knowledge of I.T.
Dima gained 16 years of experience in the tech field, going through many different and valuable experiences. “My first work experience was as an Instructor at the Information Technology Institute of Egypt, but soon I joined I.T. on the practical side and gained experience at national companies. Then, I started my journey at multinational companies. I joined Hewlett-Packard as Senior Support Operation Engineer and Release Management and stayed there for four years. I then spent five years at Vodafone International Services, where I was responsible for the automation, monitoring, and supporting of the operations.”
Eventually, she spent some time at a German company before doing some freelancing. She joined Finoa during the pandemic as a System Operations Engineer. “I didn’t know anything about Finoa before they reached out. I started my journey with the interviews. I was told what they were doing and it sounded promising. I enjoyed talking to them. Then, I was given the opportunity to build the team and the whole infrastructure, which is exactly what I like to do.”
Dima considers System administration and the SysOps team as the backbone of the company itself. “We are responsible for the backend of every system Finoa is working on — from logging into the platform to the marketing website, the emailing systems, GitLab for the developers, and so on. We need to ensure that everything is working and available reliably and securely. We have ongoing projects to improve our systems, but we also need to be ready to respond to any issues that come up in real-time, acting immediately to bring the systems back up. Afterward, we develop plans to mitigate those issues from happening again in the future.”
When asked about her daily work routine, Dima says “when I start my day, I check my tasks, prioritize them, and start working. But it’s expected that I’ll get interrupted by requests from developers. Often I will pause what I’m doing to provide them with the information or support they need, and then continue with what I was working on. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll step away from what I’m doing to assist with deployment releases, where our developers improve the systems.”
Before joining Finoa, Dima had no experience in the crypto space — she wasn’t an investor and had never worked with blockchain technology. She just had some general knowledge about bitcoin. “Today I know that crypto is a big world, it’s more than just bitcoin. The first blockchain I worked with was Mina, and I had valuable experiences setting up our blockchain nodes. I’m still not experienced with every blockchain, but I have enough knowledge to deal with the assets we work on at Finoa — I can actively troubleshoot and find the issues inside the nodes.”
Since joining Finoa in January 2021, Dima has seen a lot of growth and change at the company. “On the system team we were just two people, now we are five, and there are more people joining us. In the beginning, I was working closely with only a few people, but now I talk to a much larger network of people inside the company. There have also been many improvements to our processes, not only the technical ones but also approvals, hiring, security, and how we communicate internally with partners and customers. I’ve witnessed and assisted in many positive changes, and we are still improving Finoa more and more.”
Today, Dima is delighted to continue her journey with Finoa. “I like the people, the management, and what I’m working on. I feel responsible for everything. Even if I’m sleeping, I wake up to check the system because I need to ensure everything is working fine. Recently, we implemented an on-call rotation where there is always at least one person from the system operations team ensuring all components are working fine. The Finoa system is my baby, and the company is like my family.”
Interested in joining Finoa? Check out our open positions.