Synergent’s mission is to “help credit unions succeed and improve the financial lives of their members.” In our monthly Employee Spotlight series, we feature one of our dedicated staff members to help you get to know the people who are working as an extension of your credit union team.
For the past four years, Alex Kublanovsky has been an important part of Synergent’s Core Processing & Automation team. As an Automation Engineer, he works behind the scenes to support production operations for credit unions, helping ensure critical systems and processes run accurately and efficiently. From monitoring automated jobs and troubleshooting issues to designing new automation that improves operational workflows, Kublanovsky plays a key role in keeping the technology credit unions rely on running smoothly.
Supporting credit unions requires careful attention to the details that members may never see but depend on every day. Kublanovsky’s work focuses on maintaining reliable automation, responding quickly when challenges arise, and finding solutions that help prevent disruptions before they impact credit union operations.
“My typical day involves monitoring and maintaining time-based, file-based, and event-driven automation jobs across our AIX and Windows environments,” Kublanovsky explained. “We encounter automation failures stemming from late files from vendors, changes to batch jobs, script changes, and a variety of other sources. We strive to resolve any failures before they impact the credit union’s members, ACH, or other regulatory deadlines, as well as jumping in on anything credit unions report through customer service that needs root-cause investigation.”
From Problem Solver to Automation Lead
The work requires both technical expertise and a proactive mindset. Automation issues must be addressed quickly and accurately before they become visible to the teams and members who rely on those systems. By keeping processes moving smoothly, Kublanovsky helps provide stability across the daily operations supported by Synergent.
Kublanovsky’s responsibilities have expanded well beyond daily schedule maintenance and troubleshooting. His role has grown to include greater responsibility for production operations, incident response, and automation initiatives that support credit unions.
“I came in focused on day-to-day schedule maintenance and job troubleshooting, but the role has grown into a lot more ownership,” Kublanovsky shared. “I’ve since become an escalation contact during incidents and served as technical lead for Jack Henry™ Symitar® core processing releases. I’ve also gotten involved in credit union conversions and mergers, building out and configuring all the automated job schedules within OpCon, a workload automation platform, needed to bring a new credit union’s processing onto our platform from the ground up. Beyond that, I get to design new automation for our existing credit unions from scratch, which pushes me to think creatively about how to make their processes more efficient.”
Kublanovsky didn’t originally envision a career in information technology. Although he began in a very different field, his natural curiosity and interest in solving problems eventually led him to IT, where he found a profession well suited to his analytical mindset.
“My path here wasn’t a straight line,” Kublanovsky recalled. “I actually went to school for criminal justice and worked in corrections before realizing that wasn’t the direction I wanted my career to go. I’d always been the go-to tech guy in every job I had, building computers for friends and family on the side, so I decided to lean into that and make the switch into IT.”
Making that change allowed Kublanovsky to build a broad technical foundation before moving into automation engineering. His early experience in end-user support and systems administration introduced him to the infrastructure, security, and operational responsibilities that would later become central to his work at Synergent.
“I started out in end-user support as a Support Desk Technician at a community bank and worked my way up through systems administration and managing Windows servers, VMware environments, and active directory/exchange, along with vulnerability management and patching,” Kublanovsky noted. “That gave me a strong infrastructure foundation, and when the opportunity came up to move into automation at Synergent, focused specifically on production operations for credit unions, it was a natural next step that let me combine that infrastructure background with a much deeper focus on automation and scheduling.”
One theme has remained consistent throughout Kublanovsky’s career: a genuine enjoyment of solving complex problems. Automation gives him the opportunity to investigate what happened, determine why it happened, and identify ways to make processes more reliable in the future.
“I’ve always liked the puzzle-solving side of IT,” Kublanovsky said. “Figuring out why something went wrong and what will keep it from happening again. Automation work takes that and raises the stakes: we’re supporting mission-critical systems where timing and accuracy really matter. What keeps me engaged is that it’s never static. New job dependencies, new failure modes, new ways to make a process more efficient. There’s always something to dig into!”
Powering Reliable Operations and Seamless Migrations
Although much of Kublanovsky’s work happens behind the scenes, its impact is felt every day by the credit unions Synergent serves.
“My team’s work directly keeps the credit union’s daily operations running smoothly and on time,” Kublanovsky emphasized. “Batch processing, ACH, and file movement that their members depend on without ever seeing. When something does go wrong, our automation and monitoring catch it fast, often before it becomes a customer-facing issue. That reliability translates into credit unions being able to trust that their core processing just works, so they can focus on their members instead of worrying about back-end operations.”
Technology may be at the center of Kublanovsky’s work, but collaboration is what brings it all together.
“Honestly, it’s the teamwork that goes into solving problems,” Kublanovsky reflected. “When something breaks, it’s rarely a solo effort. I commonly have multi-department calls, and we work through issues together, with everyone bringing their own piece of the puzzle until we figure out exactly what broke, and we then get it fixed. There’s a great sense of camaraderie in digging into a tough failure as a group and walking away having solved it together.”
The opportunities Kublanovsky has had at Synergent have challenged him to expand both his technical expertise and his approach to working with others.
“Coming from a Windows-focused background, learning the Unix/AIX side of things was a big shift for me, and I’ve grown a lot more comfortable navigating and troubleshooting in that environment,” Kublanovsky shared. “I’ve also grown from being the ‘go-to guy’ who handles things solo into someone who leans more on the team, bringing in the right people, coordinating across departments, and trusting that we’ll get to the answer faster together than I would on my own.”
When asked about a project he’s especially proud of, Kublanovsky immediately points to one that required extensive planning, coordination, and teamwork.
“The hardware refresh project stands out to me,” Kublanovsky recalled. “We brought in brand new physical servers along with new Pure Storage controllers, and it took multiple teams to rack and configure everything before we could even think about moving data. Once that was in place, we migrated all of our credit unions’ databases over in batches across multiple overnight weekends. It took a lot of careful coordination and validation at every step, and there was a real sense of accomplishment watching it all come together successfully, seeing every credit union’s data and operations land safely on the new platform, running faster than before and speeding up our overnight processing for every credit union.”
More recently, Kublanovsky found another opportunity to lead a major initiative.
“Being tech lead for our 2026.00 release stands out as a real highlight,” Kublanovsky said. “The team worked through each step methodically, and we had every service back up and validated right on schedule. Leading that effort and seeing the team pull it off cleanly, on time, and under pressure was a genuinely proud moment for me.”
Finding Balance on and off the Trails
When the workday is over, Kublanovsky enjoys spending time with family, friends, and the two energetic companions waiting for him at home.
“At home, I have two rescue dogs who keep me on my toes and make sure I’m never sitting still for too long,” Kublanovsky added. “Beyond that, I try to carve out as much time as I can for friends and family. That’s really what keeps me balanced outside of the day to day.”
Another outlet for Kublanovsky is mountain biking, a hobby that combines his love of the outdoors with a good challenge.
“I like to hit up the trails, mountain biking, though I’ve learned the hard way that pouring several paychecks into a nicer bike and all the gear doesn’t automatically make you a better rider,” Kublanovsky joked. “Still working on that part.”
