Seydou Dia // Data Engineering

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I'm a data engineer based in Berlin 🍻 with 10 years of experience in helping businesses get the most value from their data. I believe the main duty of a data engineer is to reduce the cost of information access. I like to build simple and scalable solutions to shorten the path to insights. On a personal level, I try to be a good team player, to listen more, and to be prompt to admit the limits of my knowledge. I love hiking, biking on my gravel and learning piano. My dream is to work for a company aiming to improve the world.

☎️ Contact information

Berlin, Germany

https://seydoudia.com/

sdia.pyc@gmail.com

+49 174 8217658

🧑🏾‍🔧 Work experience

Scrum master / AI Data Engineering

Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden (Dec 2020 - Currently)

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: