The Analytics Engineering Podcast

The modern data stack is the third generation of data analysis products to come to prominence since the 90's. The prior waves—data warehouse appliances and then Hadoop—were both big steps forwards but ultimately failed to live up to their initial promise. Is the modern data stack just another iteration in a long string of "trendy technologies" in data––waves that crash upon the shore but ultimatel...

What is it like to build a data team for a company in the data space? This talk is centered around how dbt Labs is building their data team. We will cover how our team is structured, how we operate and interact with the greater organization, and how we set expectations and responsibilities that are helping us become a self-service organization. Register to catch the rest of Coalesce, the Analytics...

As a product leader at companies like Heroku and Zendesk, DeVaris specialized in building infrastructure-grade products. Currently, as the CEO of Meroxa, he enables teams to build real-time data infrastructure with the same ease as we now take for granted in batch. In this romp of an episode, Tristan, Julia and DeVaris flow from his experience in tech mentorship, into the nuts and bolts of Change...

David is Sr. Director of Data at Lyst, and as leader of their analytics + data science teams he has followed the evolution of data roles closely over the past decade. David spends a lot of time thinking about career progression + data team structure, and in this conversation with Tristan + Julia they dive into the classic individual contributor vs manager conundrum, migrating between warehouses, a...

Julien has a unique history of building open frameworks that make data platforms interoperable. He's contributed in various ways to Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, Apache Parquet, and Marquez, and is currently leading OpenLineage, an open framework for data lineage collection and analysis. In this episode, Tristan & Julia dive into how open source projects grow to become standards, and why data line...

Benn is Chief Analytics Officer and a Co-founder at Mode Analytics, but you may know him from his Substack newsletter ( benn.substack.com ), where each Friday he dives into a semi-controversial topic (recent examples: "Is BI Dead?" and "BI is Dead").  In this episode, Benn, Tristan & Julia finally hash out some of these debates IRL: what *is* the modern data stack, why is the metrics layer importa...

Seth Rosen has broken data Twitter many times, and in his early-fatherhood sleep deprivation developed a wonderful Twitter persona as the battle-tested data analyst. IRL though Seth is a serious data practitioner, and as Founder at the data consultancy HashPath has helped dozens of companies get into the modern data stack + build public-facing data apps.  Now, as the founder of TopCoat, he's empow...

Brittany Bennett is Data Director at Sunrise Movement, the youth climate movement that numbers tens of thousands of members throughout every US state.  Given how quickly our industry moves, developing junior data talent is hard, but Brittany's team at Sunrise makes it look easy. And that's no accident—because Sunrise hires for mission alignment rather than technical background, they dedicate signi...

Caitlin Colgrove is Co-founder & CTO at Hex, a data workspace that allows teams to collaborate in both SQL and Python to publish interactive data apps. In this conversation, Tristan, Julia and Caitlin dive into the possibilities that real-time collaborative notebooks unlock for data teams — what if our collaboration style looked more like Google Docs than a Git workflow? For full show notes and to...

Erik Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, where he contributed to the first version of the music recommendation system. After a stint as CTO at Better.com, he's now working on building new infrastructure tooling for data teams. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tristan & Julia, Erik dives into the nuts and bolts of Spotify's recommendation algorithm, (paradoxically) why you should rarely...

In this episode, we're going to do something a little different, and turn the spotlight on co-host Julia Schottenstein. In this conversation with Tristan, you'll get to know Julia a bit—from her early childhood ambitions of becoming a "computer tycoon" (adorable!), to working in venture at NEA and now as a Product Manager at dbt Labs. They also dive into Julia's opinions on key trends shaping the...

Brian Amadio is a Data Platform Engineer at Stitch Fix, where experimentation underpins everything they do across merchandising, planning, forecasting, operations and more.  In this conversation with Tristan, Julia, and Brian you'll get into the weeds of executing multi-armed bandit experiments and learn how you can perform experiments even with limited data.  For full show notes and to read 6+ ye...

Step with Venkat into a world where data is always fresh, queries run in 1ms, and analytics engineers build web-scale, real-time data apps. As Engineering Director at Facebook, Venkat helped build the RocksDB real-time database that powered growth to 5 billion queries per second(!)—and now with his colleagues at Rockset, he's bringing that real-time database infrastructure to the rest of us. In th...

Robert Chang is a product manager for the data platform at Airbnb, where he helped build and roll out Minerva, Airbnb's internal metrics store. They use Minerva to track over 12,000(!) metrics and 4,000(!) dimensions with consistency across the organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Robert dives into why they built it, what it took to get it done—and crucially, what you should...