One thing that makes Opower such a great place to work is the talented, fun and interesting group of people. Our employees come from a diverse set of backgrounds and careers, including other start-ups, law firms, federal and state government and large corporations.

Staring today, we will be highlighting new Opower employees to learn why they love working at Opower.

First up…

Jon Beckham!

Jon Beckham recently joined Opower to lead the Systems Operations team, the Developer Operations team, and the Release Engineering team. By assuming control of all aspects of the software and hardware release and deployment cycle, he’ll be responsible for rapidly standardizing these services and providing a more robust platform for the creation of new technologies at Opower. His passion for resiliency, automation, and the removal of obstacles in recurring processes will allow Opower’s engineering organization to continue to push technology forward, and allow us to advance our goal of increasing energy efficiency worldwide through intelligent applications of Big Data.

Prior to joining Opower, Jon worked at Box, the Enterprise Cloud Content Management provider. While at Box, he pushed service availability and resiliency forward while growing the infrastructure over 300%, while building a world-class team of system engineers. Additionally he designed and oversaw the initial phases of an international delivery network aimed at improving the user experience for Box’s global audience. Previous experience also includes hi5, at the time a top 20 website with over 60 million monthly active users, where he quickly took a painful monthly release cycle down to a predictable weekly cycle with daily minor releases, unlocking a more rapid approach to software development, long before the concepts espoused by “DevOps” emerged.

Jon received his degree in Computer Science from The Georgia Institute of Technology, while working full-time for Reflex Security (now Reflex Systems), an early creator of intrusion prevention systems.

Three Questions

1. What made you want to join Opower?

In 2008 I left Atlanta to walk the Appalachian Trail, and was planning to move to the west coast following that sabbatical. During my time growing a beard and living in the woods, I unsurprisingly became even more of a hippie. It’s exciting to get the chance to apply my experience to something meaningful, like improving energy efficiency, instead of selling goofy animated gifs on a social network. When I came to interview at Opower it was pretty obvious that I belonged here, thanks to the interesting problem space, the incredible engineers I would get to work with, and the technical challenges that we need to solve.

2. What has been your favorite thing about Opower so far?

Every day I come in to the office and am amazed by how much leverage individual contributors are able to exert here. We’re a small company responsible for taking a really big bite out of energy consumption, and every day we get a little better at that. Every project we execute on gets us another step of the way towards making the world a more efficient place, and it’s a great feeling.

3. What are some of your hobbies?

In my free time I’m either brewing beer, riding my bike somewhere I’ve never been, or backpacking. A fun combination of hobbies that I recently discovered is that I can take a bike loaded with camping gear on an overnight trip on a random weeknight, without anyone at the office knowing that I spent the night in the woods.