We always want to keep the lines of communication open at Amara, and getting to know each other and our roles within the organization is a great place to start. This month features Fran Ontanaya, Technical Operations Manager at Amara!
Meet Fran Ontanaya
My name is Fran, and I’m the Technical Operations Manager at Amara. I’m based in Valencia, Spain, although I spend several months a year in southwest Poland with my partner’s family.
My work takes place mostly on the On Demand side of things — understanding customer’s technical requirements, making custom guidelines, transcoding videos, and providing less common subtitle formats. I often help with solutions to handle these requirements, and create customized solutions by writing additional code to process videos and subtitles. I also dig up subtitling specifications for our Handbook and assist our On Demand Community by answering questions about guidelines and resolving any issues. Beyond On Demand, I provide the team with data and reports, upload simple scripts for organizations to use our API, answer some support tickets, report bugs, and even review some subtitles.
In my spare time, casual biking is what I enjoy the most. I even fly my urban bike between places. Since I work remotely, I don’t really need it for commuting, but I use it for most of my groceries and shopping trips. I also devote some time to improve my cooking skills — something the people around me definitely enjoy — as well as getting started with electronics and Arduino programming and reading news about space science.
One important reminder I’d like to share for newer subtitlers, is that we have ways to check for common issues. Please poke me on Skype chat about the video and language you are working on to get some quick pointers on what to improve.
