Meet us — Interview with Dané Engel
Behind every technology is a team of great people! Let’s meet the experts behind our solutions.
Meet our Data Engineering expert from the Headquarters, in the Netherlands.
Can you describe your position at Azerion?
My position is Principal Data Engineer at Improve Digital, part of the Azerion Platform. In the data engineering team, we are responsible for ingesting large amounts of data which is mainly produced by our internal platforms.
During ingestion, some pipelines enrich and aggregate data while others produce data on a more granular level.
The data is made available to a number of different internal and external consumers, on various platforms, and at various intervals.
We work together with, amongst others, our BI team to turn raw data into useful information for our end-users, which enable them to make more informed decisions.
How does your typical work day look like?
A typical work day (pre-pandemic) used to look a little bit different than it does these days. Firstly, it used to include heading to the office in the morning. Before continuing with outstanding JIRA tickets, issues or requests that popped up overnight would be looked at. Our mid-morning team stand-up would be followed by a quick coffee catchup and then we would get back to coding and working through a few code reviews. To break the day we either go for a stroll outside to get some fresh air or play a game of pool or ping-pong, which also does the trick. Nowadays, as face-to-face communication is not an option, Slack is used continuously during the day to communicate. During my on-call window, I keep a close eye on our data support chat in case there are any questions or urgent issues which might pop up.
What are the challenges and difficulties of your job?
Every day brings its own challenges, there’s never a dull moment.
In our industry, things can change quite fast, both on the tech and business side.
On the tech side, something that is relevant now might not be in 6 months or a year from now. It’s important to stay up to date with new developments as we strive to create and maintain performant pipelines at a reasonable cost.
Business requirements can also change often as they aim to put the best products out, so we need to be flexible and agile with our processes.
Changes on our business platform can also mean data volume changes, which we need to be ready for.
What is your biggest accomplishment at Azerion?
I see it more as a number of small accomplishments rather than one big one.
I joined the company when it was still quite small and I’m very proud of how far we’ve come through the years.
There have been a few tough migrations along the way which have led us to where we are now, with a good and stable framework to build on.
