I haven’t written on here for a bit and this will be a significant departure from my previous content where I typically just wrote about math and data analytics to something more about myself. Last week I had a software engineer reach out to ask about how I became a data engineer and so we video chatted and I figured I would recap some of that. I’ve had people reach out about similar things in the past but never video chatted with anyone.
Tell me a little about your work experience?
I started doing data related work in 2020 (February) right before the pandemic as a data analyst at a small music company (TuneCore). I taught myself Python, R and SQL a little before this using Coursera and Udemy. When I started I had very little knowledge of data analytics or music but was able to quickly learn a lot there. For most of the time while I was there I had no knowledge of data engineering but slowly learnt that a lot of the work we did relied upon key data engineering ideas to process royalties and make reports.
Eventually a chunk of the data team ended up moving on and a recruiter reached out about a contract position at Facebook/Meta for data engineering. I passed the interviews and joined a subset of ads called advertiser automation. I quickly ramped up and worked on a number of alphas for Automated App Ads and Automated Shopping Ads then later supported various revenue and ecommerce related workstreams (as well as several war rooms)…
