By day, you’ll find this Senior SharePoint Engineer teaching his colleagues how to leverage cloud technologies and advance their day-to-day functions. At night, he is building large server environments from his home and being a role model for his young daughter. Steve Mueller is a true gem with a passion for cloud tech and believes that if you have with the right tools, anyone can succeed. See how Steve advances with us! 

What drew you to Extreme?

I was really sold on Extreme through the interview process. Everyone at Extreme that I interviewed with was just really welcoming with their personality and seemed genuine. In interviews I’ve experienced with other companies, they would be nice, but you could tell that it was not always genuine.

The culture that Extreme described sounded great. There were social gatherings, like beer-30s on Fridays, casual dress code, and free coffee – which is awesome. And after being on the team for 2+ years, I can say the people here are great. Everybody that I work with is really nice and that’s something that I haven’t gotten in other companies.

Tell us about your role at Extreme.

I’m the Senior Office 365 SharePoint Engineer. I’m really focused on SharePoint and making it easier for our employees to find key resources that they need on our company intranet page, “The Source,” so they are not spending precious time trying to find one document. I also spend time teaching others how to use the Microsoft suite of technologies.

What advice would you give colleagues or recent college grads that might be pursuing a role similar to yours?

My number one piece of advice is to learn as much as you can. For example, I have a rather large server environment in my house, and I use that to learn about technology. This really helped me gain crucial experience to understand how all this stuff fits together. Random stuff will break that you won’t see in a classroom, and that’s going to help you when you go to a job. You will have experienced that on your own and not just in a safe environment. 

^{[Snapshot of Steve’s home server environment.]}

Another piece of advice would be to find a mentor. One of the best things that happened during my career was finding a mentor – actually, he found me. At a previous company, I was in a service desk/systems admin role. We had an IT consultant who worked in our department and he really took me under his wing. We would go out after work and have a beer, have dinner, and talk about life goals. He had a lot more life experience than I did, and he gave me good career advice and showed me that some of my goals were kind of short-sighted and that I needed to look at the long term too. I don’t know if I would be where I am today without his advice. I believe it’s a really beneficial thing to find a mentor.

Who inspires you and why?

I would have to say my daughter. She makes me want to be a better person for her. She is the sweetest little girl and always goes out of her way to be kind to and help others. Whenever I’m making a decision about something, I always think about her and if it’s something she would be proud of me for.

^{[Steve’s daughter helps Steve with car upgrades when she can.]}

What’s a fun fact about yourself that maybe no one knows?

One thing that many people don’t know about me is that when I was younger, I used to take dance classes and be really into hip hop.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I’m pretty busy outside of work. My family and I are really active in our church – we do food drives and various missions. We also love to go on family hikes and bike rides, and we go to the mountains and beach anytime that we can. My favorite hobbies are photography, cars, and technology. I have my own YouTube channel F-Thirty3 where I showcase DIY’s on BMWs and do product reviews. The channel has been pretty cool because it combines all of my hobbies into one. My daughter helping me with the cars is fun too, I love that she’s getting into my hobby because it’s something we can enjoy together.

^{[The Mueller family after reaching the peak of a weekend hike.]}

Why do you think diversity and inclusion are important?

Everybody should be given the opportunity to learn and grow. I want to give everyone either advice or the tools they need to succeed, regardless of anything. We are all people, and everybody should have the same tools to succeed.

Join Steve and the rest of the team!

Visit our careers page to explore opportunities in IT as well as the many other roles in which you can advance and help Extreme drive effortless networking experiences for enterprises worldwide.