Life at Liberis with Laura Wyglendacz

Hi! My name is Laura Wyglendacz. I’m a leader and a technologist. For the past 5-6 years my focus has been building data products.

I’m playing a few different roles at Liberis. My job title is Staff Engineer. Staff+ Engineers are individual contributors. It is a leadership role predicated on broad organisational influence and involvement. Right now I’m also managing Liberis’ data engineers in an interim Head Of role. I’m building relationships with and between teams who produce or consume data. I expect my role and job title will continue to evolve, due to Liberis’ size and lifecycle stage. My personal style is to switch between tactical and strategic modes depending on what’s required. Liberis is in growth mode, scaling up. We need to be agile and innovative to secure our place in the market. I’m helping define and build the sociotechnical* data systems to support this growth.

Sociotechnical: shorthand for the complex interactions between people and organisations, and the infrastructure and software that they build*.**

Lots of things! Here are my top 2 so far:

Leaders I respect

• Individual leaders have shown themselves to be vulnerable, approachable, and self-reflective.
• Many of them ‘practice what they preach’ in terms of demonstrating company behaviours. This includes admitting when they fail.
• This is rare in my experience, which makes it all the more notable.

Action-oriented culture

• Meaning is derived from action and behaviour, rather than what the company, or individuals, say they will do.
• This is apparent across the whole business – from PR, to People, to Operations (and beyond!).

I have only worked here for 5 months, and from my first day, I have felt welcome. It still FEELS good to work here. In some organisations, friendliness stops after a couple of weeks when your ‘new person’ status wears off, or, it is limited to your functional area. 

This is super important to me. As a socially anxious person, I struggle to feel comfortable in new groups. Times of change like starting a new job are nerve-wracking for other reasons too. I’m neurodivergent and upheavals in routine and environment affect me disproportionately. The culture of social inclusion at Liberis has brought me out of my shell and helped me settle in quickly. I feel motivated to pass on that great feeling, by reaching out to connect to others more than I usually would.

I also remember being immediately inspired by people here. Regardless of job title or business function, a curiosity and drive to succeed infuses conversations at Liberis with an energy that I find motivating and exciting.

I’m the kind of person who can’t put a wall between the personal and the professional. That is not to say I don’t have boundaries, but anything I spend 8+ hours a day doing would become profoundly personal to me in terms of impact on my whole life. I’ve recently experienced a few difficult years of mental and physical health challenges. The biggest contributing factor was being bullied whilst working somewhere that did not have a well-functioning People team. At Liberis I have a good support network of people and resources already. It is no exaggeration to say that it is healing to work at a company which has already demonstrated how much it values me and cares about my well-being and health.

It will be easier to develop professionally in such an environment – my people management skills are growing fast, and I’m excited about what comes next!

Liberis is showing strong signs of commitment to inclusion – in deed, not just in word. I have several hidden disabilities, and I’m a woman (yup, still a rarity in tech) – so this is important to me.

I’m 11-12 years into my tech career, and just about everywhere I’ve worked or interviewed at has talked big talk about being inclusive and diverse. Most of those places did not commit to making reasonable adjustments and did not do the work to avoid or challenge discriminatory practices and behaviours, either institutionally or amongst individuals.

Liberis seems different. It has engaged with my identity, my needs and my rights in an authentic and intelligent manner. It is the first place I have worked which acknowledges the urgency and importance of supporting me to be myself and to be well, by listening, learning, and taking action quickly.

I am very excited about seeing the future product opportunities that will be unlocked when Liberis’ investments in event-based architecture and a scalable data platform start to bear fruit.