Seydou Dia - Data and Engineer Leader
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☎️ Contact information
Berlin, Germany
sdia.pyc@gmail.com
+49 174 8217658
Background and Goals
I am a Phd Physicist by training, but by trade I am an experienced data engineer. I was born in Senegal, and I had the opportunity to travel the world at a very young age. That helps me a lot to relate with colleagues from various background.
Currently I am working as Head of Engineering, and this is what I do:
- I have the opportunity to turn ideas into reality by empowering people with empathy, by writing code and algorithm and sometimes by using a bit of magic.
- I work closely with the Product Management team to define processes and priorities
- I combine both the Starter and Growth mindset; in the day to day work that translates to rapid prototyping and short iterations when it comes to product, technological processes and innovation. At the same time I am garant of the stability and availability of all services by developing technical and quality standards.
- I hire, retain and manage engineers (developers, data and devops)
- I actively take part of sprint planning and daily stand-ups. I am also involve in coding, pull requests reviews and brainstormings.
- I am involve in budget management and resources allocation across the organisation.
- As a manager, I create clear engineering objectives aligned with the product and business vision. These goals are aligned with the CTO every quarter, tracked in the project management tool, and regularly reviewed during 1:1s.
- I build growth plan to support the team build on their individual strength in a direction that is also beneficial to the organisation. The aforementioned goals setting help with that.
- With my experience in Technology and Business I have develop a keen eye for skills and ability assessment, to help formulate what is needed and the best utilisation of the available resources.
- I enjoy the bi-weekly 1:1 with each team member, this helps build relationship but also constantly track performance, drive productivity and figure out motivators and blockers.
- As an avid learner I keep an eye on new engineering trend that may be beneficial to the organisation or the individual growth of the team.
- I write and document. I love writing and I write a lot. This allows me to manage volume of information and process them asynchronously and clarify my ideas. I encourage my team to learn to write and touch-type. We write about meeting agenda, meeting notes, tech design, READMEs, 1:1s (with manager, peers, reports).
🧑🏾🔧 Work experience
Head of Engineering
SellerX, Berlin, Germany (Sept 2022 - Currently)
I am currently leading the data and software engineering function at SellerX.
SellerX is a Berlin-based, high-growth eCommerce player that aims to consolidate Amazon’s most successful sellers, acquiring them to scale their business and turn their brands into global household names. At SellerX I successfully scaled the data platform using cloud native approach. The achievement I am most proud of is the reduction of downtime, an increase of service availability, robust monitoring. This resulted in happier stakeholders and increase quality of life for the developers.
People management / Python / Kubernetes / AWS / ArgoCD / Terraform / Helm / Office 360
Scrum master / AI Data Engineering
Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden (Dec 2020 - July 2022)
In 2021, Ericsson focuses on 5G roll out, AI, and a cloud based radio access network (CloudRAN). Hired as data engineer, in practice I have multiple hats - working as a Python developer / k8s devops for the Ericsson Product Information Assistant, an AI based assistant similar to Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa.
In the CloudRAN project, the team I joined was working on AI based Canary deployment for the RAN. I helped as a data engineer solving data bottleneck, acted as the scrum master by fostering agile practices: sprint planning, daily stand-ups, frequent releases, stakeholder management.
I've helped improve the Gitlab cicd pipeline.
Python / Kubernetes / Azure / AWS / GCP / Helm / Gitlab
Freelance Data Engineering
Youprice, Berlin, Germany (Oct 2019 - Nov 2020)
Youprice is an analytics plugin for the Shopify platform. I help setup data pipeline used for the analytics and the A/B testing app.
Python / AWS Redshift / Statistics / Shopify API
flowkey, Berlin, Germany (Jan 2019 - Oct 2019)
flowkey is a mobile and web piano learning application. I was hired as the first data professional to define the data roadmap. The roadmap involved datawarehouse, business intelligence KPIs, AB testing, Search ads, CLV, recommendation systems, GDPR. This allows the company to switch gears from "product/market fit" to "optimization and growth". Very quickly after I joined, it was very common to run 2 A/B tests a month; moreover the engineering team was less afraid of making changes as the feedback cycle became very short.
Python / AWS Redshift / MongoDB / Javascript / ReactJS / Airflow
Project manager data engineering
OLX Group, Berlin, Germany – (Jan 2016 - Dec 2018)
OLX is a classifieds platform (like eBay, or Craigslist). In 2016 I led the data lake design to scale to our 42 markets, 300 millions MAU and feed the global BI dashboard. From 2017 I worked on the prototype of the experimentation platform along with the engineering team. The AB testing application went live in June 2018, this project ranks on top of my proud professional achievements as it was pivotal to the company mindset switch towards experimentation and real data based decision.
Python / AWS Redshift / MySQL / Airflow
Data lake solution architect
OLX Group, Buenos Aires, Argentina – (Sept 2015 - Jan 2016)
Joined as data engineer in the Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) team. The task was to deploy the CLM, stack which consists of personalized marketing treatments (push notifications, emails, sms, recommendations, search ranking), to 40 markets. The task involves building data pipelines and data intensive applications.
Python / AWS Redshift / MySQL / Jenkins / Django / PhP
Data generalist
Rocket Internet, Berlin, Germany– (Feb 2014 - Aug 2015)
Rocket Internet is a startups incubator and investor (e.g. Zalando, Hellofresh) with a focus on growth and rapid execution. My team was responsible to help early stage ventures bootstrap their data stack. This was crucial as the ventures have little time to prove product market fit. The projects span from operations (business intelligence), marketing spending, product (data science).
Python / Google BigQuery / AWS Redshift / MongoDB / MySQL / Salesforce
Python developer, PostgreSQL specialist
Group Seb, Lyon, France – (Jan 2012 - Dec 2013)
Group Seb is the world's largest manufacturer of cookware (e.g. Tefal, Krups, Rowenta). I joined the e-commerce team working on search and recommendation systems; I have collaborated with data science, BI team (data, algorithms) and the engineering team (api, search backend).
Python / Django / PostgreSQL / jQuery
Software and database consultant
Freelance, France – (Sept 2011 - Jan 2012)
After my PhD I started freelance work for small companies, mainly subcontractors for the nuclear industry. The tasks mainly involved signal processing and industrial automation.
Python / PostgreSQL / LabView / Matlab
Technology
💾 SQL
For me SQL is the most efficient tool to manipulate data. Also anyone familiar with Excel can understand SQL - which is most of the analysts, BI and business people. I have a deep understanding of SQL, I can express really complex query fluently.
🐍 Python
The programming language I most comfortable with. I've worked with Python for over 10 years. As a scientist during my PhD but also as an engineer in the IT industry. I am familiar with most of the web framework and have a firm understanding of its programming paradigms (async, generators, iterators, objects)
☁️ Cloud
I have a cloud first mindset, that is before rolling a custom solution I always see if there are alternatives, usually in the form of cloud services. I have a deep knowledge of AWS (3 times certified), I have also experience on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure.
🐳 DevOps
I adopt the devops mindset, in terms of automation and deployment. I am familiar with the major Unix/Linux distributions(package management, networking). I am an advocate of version control (git). I know the major infrastructure as code solutions (Cloudformation, Terraform).
Languages
🇬🇧 professional level English | 🇩🇪 B1 level German | 🇫🇷 native level French
Articles and Talks
📚 Education
PhD in Physics
2012 - Université Haute Alsace / Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - France
Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering
2009 - Strasbourg, France
Bachelor Mathematics, Physics
2007 - Paris, France
👾 Misc Projects
I like to learn and sometimes learning means to memorise things. To help me memorise I tend to build custom space repetition application in Javascript, for examples:
More projects available at https://seydoudia.com/