Meet the Humans of Snipp - Niall Kelly

Niall Kelly - Director/ Technical Head, Cork-Ireland

Managing beers, beekeeping & databases

There is always something brewing with Niall, since he qualified as a Brewer and Distiller earlier this year. He makes several types of beers, though he leans more towards Ales and Stouts. He enjoys haggling for ingredients with the local malting house by bringing different types of beers to exchange for malt.

Niall also has a secret life as a beekeeper.

“I have hives at home and in other people’s gardens,” shares Niall. “Along with harvesting honey, I make meads, melomel, and cysers.”

When Niall isn’t busy with bees or brewing, he manages the entire Ireland office for Snipp. He’s been looking after Snipp’s databases for the past seventeen years. When the “sales team gets a rush of blood to their head and sells the impossible,” Niall makes it happen.

Achieving fantastic tech feats & building team camaraderie

Before Snipp, Niall traveled extensively across Cambodia, Russia, and Vietnam, often working with “slow and inferior” equipment. This is where he trained his mind to think “out of the box” and achieve efficient yet fantastic tech feats.

For there is nothing more that annoys Niall than inefficient systems and people. And there is nothing more that gives him joy than watching younger developers on his team getting “seemingly impossible tasks done.”

“At Snipp, we’re always on our toes,” says Niall. “There never is a dull day at work.”

Apart from the diversity of clients, what really keeps Niall at Snipp is “the support from the team is not like anywhere else I have ever worked.”

The credit for the success of the Ireland team goes to Niall, who built it over the past decade, now twice the size from its inception. For Niall, settling a multi-cultural team in Ireland, complete with his colleagues’ families being able to move to Cork, has been one of the bigger achievements of his life.

Fix the bath….

He attributes much of his professional success to a simple mantra – “fix the bath.” For the uninitiated, this means fixing the leaky problem at the source and not just covering the crack with a bandage, which will give way soon enough.

Communication with pizza & buying bitcoins

Niall feels communication is the key to solving challenges at work. He often facilitates team-boding by hosting parties at his home, multi-cuisine potlucks, or make-your-own-pizza-bread sessions.

“That is where the actual communication takes place,” he says. “Where people see each other for the people they are and not just their job designations.”

There is absolutely nothing Niall would like to change about his life’s journey. For him, everything in life is going exceptionally well, and he has everything he needs.

Except he wishes he had bought some bitcoins.

Connect with Niall here.

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