Four Questions with Chris Whyde on Devops at TransUnion

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We sat down with Chris Whyde, Vice President of Global Technology DevOps and Engineering, to hear his insights on the upcoming trends and state of technology, as it pertains to TransUnion. Learn more about Technology at TransUnion.  

1. What are the most important/innovative technology trends you see as companies adapt and how would you describe TU’s technology culture?

One of the major trends we continue to see is the rise of a DevOps culture. DevOps transformations push security left and advance technology culture while focusing on new disciplines such as feature flagging, static code analysis and container security – all with an eye toward delivering product faster in a secure and performant fashion. To provide some context, DevOps is an approach to software development, which enables a stronger lifecycle process and enhanced back-end operation.  

The days of infrastructure, applications and security being separate and isolated are over. As we expand our use of Cloud, we’re leveraging new opportunities for automation. Through the implementation of DevOps – a development culture of end-to-end automation – we’re freeing up developers from manual tasks to focus on innovation, while reducing potential risks in our environment. This not only increases predictability, quality and security, it also improves the overall developer experience. At TransUnion, we are actively executing our technology transformation to bring new solutions and products to the marketplace. 

2. What do these trends mean for engineers and technologists?

This means that engineers and developers can now experience a more integrated process as new applications spin up. At TransUnion, we believe in hiring and growing the best talent and creating space for innovation. When DevOps processes, tools and culture take hold in an organization, the pace of innovation increases and engineers are able to focus on making an impact versus manual tedious tasks. Organizations also benefit through the adoption of these practices by achieving radical transparency into code quality, security, and compliance. 

TransUnion is giving employees opportunities to grow their skills and become stronger professionally. We’ve centered our strategy around our people and providing the resources to build a robust DevOps environment. With offices all around the globe, collaboration and unique perspectives drive our workplace environment forward.  

3. How is TransUnion leveraging DevOps to create/enhance new solutions and applications?

Currently, we are revolutionizing our developer experience through focused implementation of robust and mature CI/CD pipelines and strategic investment in the latest tools to create an enriching environment for our development teams. This work is fostering an environment of collaboration and creativity unlocking the potential of our teams to deliver best in class products for our customers globally. The work we have done in this space has enabled TransUnion to deploy solutions on average 2 times more frequently – significantly impacting the velocity with which we can innovate. 

4. If someone is interested in joining the team, what skills come to mind as must-haves?

Let me start by saying they should absolutely join the TransUnion team! The skills we look for are depth of technical prowess in various technologies like Java, .Net, and Abinitio to name a few. We also love to see a wealth of experience in building and supporting cloud native applications. Additionally, we look for builders – what I mean by this is we want to hire creators that can chart the course of our technology landscape. Overall, I’d say that we are looking for people with creative minds and deep technical skills who are ready to make an impact and engineer great products.If creating the next wave of solutions excites you, then consider finding your next challenge by joining our Technology Team at TransUnion.

Learn more here!