A cloud platform that enables and collaborates with Oura’s core functions

Cloud Platform members Juha Tiensyrja, Sharanya Madhyastha, and Jan Srzednicki share their passion for technologies, working in the cloud with a down-to-earth approach, and their experience working at Oura. 

“A day hardly goes by without learning something new,” says Juha, a member of the Cloud Platform Squad. “Working with cutting edge software technologies and talented professionals on such an important aspect of our lives, our health, is what drives me,” says another. 

In addition, our collaborative approach and curiosity enable us, the Cloud Platform Squad, to concentrate on what we care about as a team and explore new technologies that bring value to our work. 

Meet three of our team members and the technologies behind Oura’s Cloud Platform Team

Juha

Hey, I am Juha, a site reliability engineer at Oura with 15 years of professional experience working on different product services. Initially, after coming from academia, I worked on cloud services and cybersecurity. What drives me the most is my desire to make our cloud services reliable, and help the teams at Oura work smoothly. I joined the Oura family a year and a half ago and am particularly enjoying the benefits of a positive work-life balance. I’m originally from Oulu, the city where Oura was founded, so working here makes me especially proud of my hometown and our world renown export!

Sharanya

My name is Sharanya. I’m a software engineer originally from India, and I moved to Finland almost a year ago. Immediately Oura as a company piqued my interest, and I started following Oura’s online activities. Soon after, I browsed through LinkedIn, and serendipitously found an open position that fit my skillset and career ambitions. Now, I am a part of the Cloud Platform Squad, focusing on designing and implementing the backend features of the mobile app. Besides my daily life at Oura, I also enjoy the Finnish nature and the freedom of singing and strumming my guitar in peace. 

Jan

Hi, my name is Jan and I’m from Poland. I’m a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in software engineering. Twenty years ago, I kick-started my career as a system administrator, and my role quickly evolved in different areas (building systems, site reliability, and software engineering) at diverse companies such as Google. I was very tired of the rigid corporate environment, and I wanted to find a place with a low hierarchy and broader scope of work. I also wanted to have the ability to directly impact the growth of the company. After searching for a while, I found Oura. Now, I’m currently working as a backend engineer. I have been enjoying a stress-free work environment for over a year now and am working from Warsaw, Poland—enjoying our fully remote advantages! In my free time, I am fascinated by astronomy, physics, and cycling. Overall, I feel I have the opportunity to put my passions and knowledge to good use here at Oura. 

The Cloud Platform Squad Enjoys the Collaborative Approach  

We recently underwent a structural change in our team, and the Cloud Platform Team was divided into three different squads; the Data Flow Squad, the Machine Learning Squad, and the Cloud Platform Squad. Currently, we are 11 colleagues operating together collaboratively with a vast tech stack.

The logic behind our distinct teams and responsibilities: 

• The Data Flow Squad handles the mobile applications' data and stores it to the cloud for customers and data scientists to access. 
• Oura Rings collect massive amounts of data, and the Machine Learning Squad translates and transforms the data into readable formats. Working closely with the data scientists, they are also productizing new machine learning models. 
• Our Cloud Platform Squad team is responsible for building the cloud infrastructure. We are running the cloud services on Kubernetes to provide an abstraction level and support the teams with any blockers they might experience. The team is the connecting wire between the mobile application and the cloud. 

By dividing the tasks into different squads, we can focus our resources into other softwares we use at Oura and help them deploy efficiently. 

We all agree that our collaborative approach is key to our success in solving horizontal problems within the cloud platform. This approach enables us to concentrate on the infrastructure and abstraction layers; thus, the other squads can focus on the core Oura functions. Our customers are internal, and they reach out to us when they face new problems. We provide solutions to errors, flaws, or faults in the operation/design of our services.  The team is pretty engaged and thrilled about different technologies, following the trends, and developing new ways to solve our internal problems. 

Following Cloud Technology Trends Closely 

At Oura, the Cloud Platform Squad is responsible for building the cloud infrastructure. We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies to secure our cloud services platform. Isolating the components allows us to ensure quick, reliable, and consistent deployments— regardless of the environment. We also have been using the Elastic Kubernetes Service to automate the deployment and management of our cloud-native applications. Overall, we help the other teams focus on their business problem more efficiently. 

Currently, our team uses Python to program and mainly focuses on code readability and maintainability. However, our team members are very enthusiastic about trying Rust, which runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. “In addition, it has incredible features and properties such as zero-cost abstraction, threads without data races, and pattern matching, which allows you to do things that seem almost impossible”, mentions Jan. 

The message is quite evident at Oura; if we see something meaningful, we have the opportunity to address different technologies and things we are passionate about. 

Monitoring the data is also a crucial part of our tasks, as it helps us keep an eye out for any issues in our digital architecture. Currently, we are focusing on building our observability stack and using Grafana Tempo to collect distributed traces. Traces help us find bugs and pinpoint issues with service performance. To monitor our cloud native services, we are using Prometheus, as it offers flexible query language, an efficient time-series database, and a modern alerting approach. 

Among our vast set of tasks, we also build and maintain the backend components for the mobile APIs. We are currently formalizing the interface for feature rollouts. We, as a team, have the capacity and the freedom to decide which technologies fit our needs best and develop accordingly.

Freedom, a cherished value at Oura

Unlike massive corporations, at Oura we manage extensive problem fields, and we have the possibility to extend our vision to drive best practices. Everyone is highly talented, and we benefit from each other's strengths and diversity. In the Cloud Platform Squad, we work as a team, and we are a unified front—helping each other succeed in our everyday challenges.

Sharanya: “The Ubuntu philosophy of ‘We, not me’ is an embedded value of our team.”

Juha: “One of the best qualities of our team is our curiosity and continuous learning attitude. Armed with the new knowledge, we help the other squads succeed. Oura as an employer is supportive of this approach. I like the transparency and the freedom that we are entrusted with, as it only drives us to be more proactive at developing solutions.”

Jan: “Overall, working at Oura has had a big impact on my wellbeing.In my previous position, I was pretty burnt out, and I am now happily enjoying a stress-free environment.” 

What’s important for us as cloud professionals is that we are working with cutting-edge technologies and outstanding professionals to build a meaningful, beautiful little piece of technology that helps improve people's overall health. 

Together, we are stronger, and we positively impact people’s lives. 

If you are also like Juha, Sharanya, and Jan, a focused, solution-driven individual that enjoys work independence and cutting-edge technologies, we want to meet you. Learn more about careers at Oura!