Stevie Preston is a Site Reliability Engineer at DailyPay, bringing technical expertise and a commitment to meaningful work. Inspired by his father's hands-on approach to restoring cars, Stevie developed a natural curiosity for how systems work and a knack for troubleshooting complex problems. Today, he uses that passion to build and maintain the systems that help thousands of people take control of their finances.
What does your typical day look like?
As an SRE at DailyPay, my day is a constant balance between maintaining high-scale system stability and driving proactive engineering.
I start by auditing production alarms to ensure our services are performant. A large portion of my time is dedicated to feature development within the specifically, developing a configurable CLI tool that enables our teams to automatically generate base observability. This gives them instant, deep insights into their services without manual overhead.
When I’m on-call, I act as a shield for the team, managing operational toil and the helpdesk to minimize context-switching for my colleagues so they can stay focused on delivering the features that empower our end users.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently investigating and implementing open standards for our observability stack. By leveraging OpenTelemetry and other open-source projects, we are moving toward a vendor-agnostic architecture. This initiative empowers our engineering teams to develop their own testing frameworks, which simultaneously reduces overhead costs and significantly improves our overall system reliability.
What inspired you to join this company in particular?
It was the mission of financial empowerment. Financial stress is a universal burden; a CNN survey revealed that 71% of Americans identify money as their top stressor. Joining a company that provides a tangible solution. Helping people build financial security through providing on demand pay was an easy decision. It’s rare to find a role where technical excellence directly translates into someone’s peace of mind.
Did you always want to work in this industry (tech)?
Yes. I grew up watching the digital landscape shift in real-time, specifically following the evolution of platforms like Facebook into Meta. Seeing a company acquire massive innovators while maintaining a heavy investment in open-source software showed me the incredible scale and impact technology can have on global infrastructure and the way we communicate.
What’s your favourite part about your work?
The variety. As an SRE, I’m never siloed into one corner of the product. I get exposure to a vast range of technologies and the underlying business logic that makes our platform tick. I enjoy being part of the solution that solves complex technical problems for our engineers, which ultimately results in a smoother, more reliable experience for our end users.
What would you say to other people considering a job in this industry?
I’d say go for it. At DailyPay, you aren't just writing code; you are shipping features that reduce real-world financial stress. Whether it’s providing access to on-demand pay or helping someone navigate an emergency expense, the work has a direct, positive impact on someone’s financial wellbeing.
How do you see this technology impacting on our lives?
This technology is a game-changer for anyone in the hourly workforce. By moving away from rigid, traditional pay cycles and offering flexibility, we are helping friends and families manage their finances in real-time. It’s about educating and empowering users to budget on their own terms.
Who inspired you to work in this field?
My father. Although he didn’t work in tech, he worked on restoring cars. He instilled in me a natural curiosity for how things work. He taught me the art of troubleshooting and designing solutions from the ground up. While he worked with engines and wrenches, my medium is software; I find the way endless pieces of technology are orchestrated across the layers of the OSI model.
What do you consider to be the most important tech innovation or development in recent years?
It has to be Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve revolutionized how we approach productivity. Specifically, the development of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) allows companies to contextualize AI, while autonomous agents are allowing users to parallelize tasks in ways we never thought possible.
What tech gadget could you not live without?
The Raspberry Pi; it is genuinely the most versatile tool a tinkerer could have. I’ve repurposed mine dozens of times; Everything from a network-wide ad blocker and hardware projects using GPIO pins, to building my own compute. It’s a constant reminder of how much power you can pack into a tiny footprint.
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