I’ve been a technology person since I was a kid. I was always the first one among my friends who would check out new software and games, and I always loved working with PCs, computers, and other types of machinery. 

That led into high school, when I started focusing on software engineering and software development practices. I pursued a trade degree and started to work with things like Flash and object-oriented programming with C++. A trade program with a software track is a good time to really home in and focus on the things that drive where you need to be as an adult and in your career. Getting that kind of jumpstart ahead of entering the workforce definitely kickstarted me to where I am today. 

From process automation to data visualization

Right out of high school I jumped into a small mortgage servicing company and started taking phone calls from the business side, working on claims, and doing business and loan document processing. This was 15 years ago, and the job was just to get my foot in the door somewhere. Then I started to show a little bit more of my technical aptitude side where I would see a process and start to automate it and build little databases and applications for it. That led me to grow into more of a consultant for the company. And at that point I wasn’t really focused on data; it was more about automating processes and looking for efficiency improvements. 

When I was still in this role my team started to look into building monitoring, analytics and reporting on top of the business processes. They had chosen a tool called Tableau, and asked if anybody wanted to learn it. I’m always interested in learning new things, so I raised my hand. At that point my career started to shift toward analytics.

These days, I engineer software solutions for business intelligence, which is a nice integration between analytics and software engineering. You could say that’s where I found my professional purpose, because much of my career was just general before then. Now it’s more specialized and lives at the intersection of technology and data.

That intersection also reflects on my title, which like most technology roles today means you wear multiple hats. The same is true of my organization, where there are three types of people who represent our three pillars of activity:

  • Data or infrastructure engineers, who are more focused on enabling environments and infrastructure, scaling them out, ensuring they’re efficient, that they run appropriately, and that they scale to the demands of the organization. 
     
  • Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who support our end users and make sure that we’re on top of any challenge that they have and that we’re working with them to make sure they’re using best practices
     
  • Software engineers in the more traditional sense of the term, who focus on building applications to support the enablement of BI tools. 

We have hundreds of thousands of users of our products, so some of our team members are focused on building automation products and tools to just simplify SDLC and related operations, ensuring that the process is as low friction and low demand as possible. Of course, being in leadership, I’m not as day-to-day on coding, but my remit falls across these three pillars of what we do. 

When I think about it now, my journey to data leadership is a realization of interests and passions I’ve had over the entire course of my life. It’s a satisfying place to be.