Getting to know Persefoni: Meet Chris Silvernail

1. And you may ask yourself, “Well... how did I get here?” (Tell us your journey?)

I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I attended college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma where I graduated with a degree in Computer Science.

After college, my wife and I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where I began my career as an enterprise java developer. Following the birth of our first child, we moved to Portland, Oregon where I shifted to enterprise application integration and built high-performance SCADA integrations for the Bonneville Power Administration.

As our extended family grew, we decided to move back to Oklahoma so we could be closer to family and friends. I went to work at ConocoPhillips in Bartlesville, Oklahoma where I spent several years building applications in C#/.NET. Eventually, a job opportunity as a data analyst at Chesapeake Energy emerged, so we moved back to the Oklahoma City area and moved into our current residence in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Following my time at Chesapeake Energy, I consulted around the Oklahoma City area at various energy companies including OG&E, Devon Energy, and Continental Resources. I spent much of my time at these companies gathering and preparing data for their annual Greenhouse Gas reporting.

Before becoming a Persefonite, I was working remotely as a data analytics consultant for the National Football League out of their League office in NYC.

2. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. (What do you do at Persefoni?)

I am a data warehouse architect on the Osiris team. In my first several months at Persefoni, I stood up our Snowflake Data Warehouse and configured our data engineering tool, dbt Cloud.

I also configure and monitor our Fivetran environment, which is one arm of our integration toolset. It is used to sync data into Snowflake from several business applications including Salesforce, Netsuite, Zendesk, and Marketo.

Once application data is staged in Snowflake, I use dbt Cloud to code, test, and deploy data pipelines to filter and combine raw data into simple models that support ad-hoc data analysis and Tableau reporting.

3. And you may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?” (What are your hopes for your time at Persefoni?)

From a career perspective, I’m hoping to gain exposure to new technologies while learning everything I can from my coworkers. I hope to share my skillset and look forward to fresh perspectives. I enjoy solving difficult problems and couldn’t hope for a better group of people to collaborate with.

From a personal perspective, I’m hoping to form meaningful and lasting relationships with my coworkers.

I’m hopeful that my contributions will help make a difference in Persefoni’s mission to change the world.

4. And you may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?” (Why is Persefoni a great home for you?)

Throughout my career, my greatest contributions have come from trial and error rather than flawless execution. When it is time to ‘figure something out, I love to dig in, read up, and learn everything I can about it. Nonetheless, my main method of learning comes from doing and I have made some mistakes. At Persefoni, experimentation and failure are recognized as being legitimate ways to efficiently find the right way to do something, so it is a great fit.

5. And you may find yourself in another part of the world... (Tell us about your life/hobbies away from work?)

I spend most of my free time hanging out with my family. I’ve been married to Brigitte for over 23 years and we have 4 children: Ethan (20), Benji (16), Max (12), and Birdie (9).

When we are all hanging out around the house, we like watching cooking videos, eating, arguing about politics, and taking a dip in our hot tub.

We love traveling as a family and take several trips a year. We have a family cabin in Red River, NM where we spend quite a bit of time. We all enjoy the outdoors as much as we enjoy the indoors, so our visits usually consist of hiking, eating, and shopping. In the wintertime, I’ll drop my wife and kids off at the bottom of the ski lift then rush back to the cabin to play some Xbox.

We love a good beach vacation, and we have also loved visiting Disney parks several times over the years. I’m into photography, so these trips have been a great way for me to practice my hobby while capturing some wonderful memories.