β¨ Tell us a little bit about yourself personally, when you joined Sylvera, what is your role called and which team do you work in?
Hey, I’m Anastasia and I joined Sylvera in July 2023 as a Senior Data Engineer. I’m currently working in the Ratings Ops team, and our goal is to make the process of getting carbon project ratings (the ‘AAA’ to ‘D’ scores you see on our site) online as quickly as possible, all while being underpinned by a secure, well-tested method and ensuring the work is scalable.
π You’re part of the Data team here at Sylvera. In a nutshell, what is the Data team responsible for?
Sylvera is a net-zero data company, which means all of our teams have their own data products, and the data team isn’t the only one creating data for our clients. While the data team owns a chunk of the data produced by the company, the bigger goal is for our team to create processes, tools, and infrastructure to make it easy for all of our domains, ranging from technical ML engineers to less-technical analysts, to manage their own data products.
Essentially, the data team are the catalysts in unlocking the potential of domain experts to create solutions they deeply understand and are passionate about - after all, they have the subject matter expertise to know what’s valuable for the market!
βοΈIn terms of tech stack, what are some of the key languages and tools that you utilise day to day in maintaining Sylvera’s data infrastructure?
This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything we use on the data team, but a couple of technologies that stand out:
π Python: this is our bread and butter on the data team - all of our Airflow DAGs are written in Python, and we use it for our current data API, as well as our ratings generation package.
π SQL/ dbt: as we move to a data mesh model, we’re using dbt more and more to allow for modularity and buildability of our SQL models.
π Terraform/ AWS: there’s a good chunk of infrastructure management we’re expected to contribute to at Sylvera (we have a DevOps team owning key building blocks, but there are a lot of permissions and resource provisioning we’re involved in as well).
πΆβοΈWe’d love for you to walk us through a typical day in your life, as a Senior Data Engineer with Sylvera?
Most engineers at Sylvera try to follow a similar pattern for organising their working day - batch meetings in the morning (or however long they need to last), and focus on deep work in the afternoon.
Mornings are typically devoted to stand-ups (usually between 1-3 depending on how many projects you’re working on), and some teams have async standups which saves a little time. Then we may have some strategy sessions on a particular project we’re working on, or we might have one of our ceremonies (e.g. sprint review, sprint planning, refinement, wellness reviews). Here and there we might also lead or participate in Lunch & Learn sessions.
Afternoons are usually quite well-protected from meetings, save for things like Slack huddles for doing a bit of pair programming or clarifying PR comments. This is the time when we get through our tickets and execute against all the projects we’ve planned!
We also have ‘no meeting Wednesdays’ which are usually completely devoted to completing tickets and have no stand-ups or ceremonies - there are small exceptions to the no meeting rule, but generally these are the most productive days in the engineering calendar.
π What are the major challenges that your team faces, and how do you go about tackling them?
The biggest challenge the data team faces, and frankly one that’s shared among all Sylvera team members, is ensuring we’re always working on the most high-priority projects!
Our leadership team does a great job of constantly evaluating what’s most impactful for the market and relentlessly ensures those are the projects we’re working on. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, and being able to thrive in this kind of environment is one of the key commonalities found among successful Sylverans! Sometimes you’ve been working on something for a couple of weeks and are moved to another project that’s more critical.
It can be challenging to adapt to this shift and leave other work unfinished for a period. But if you’re someone who’s focused on bettering their craft and genuinely want to work on the most impactful projects for tackling climate change, it feels really good to know that the leadership always has a finger on the pulse of the latest climate developments, amd really care about doing the right thing, even when it’s hard.
π§ At Sylvera, we allocate dedicated time fortnightly for personal development days. What is something you’re particularly proud of learning or having worked on during this time?
I’ve been exploring some tooling around visualising our GitHub repos to make them more digestible for new audiences. In particular, the logic we use for generating our ratings is super complicated, and ideally we want to make development of our methods accessible for a variety of technical levels. This will involve having more of a ‘guide’ to the structure of our work.
I haven’t quite cracked this nut yet, but I’ve had a great time looking at a variety of packages that can display classes, functions, and file structure - I’m looking forward to using future personal development days to find the right constellation of diagrams to make this work truly accessible.
π We’re so pleased to have you as part of the team. Why did you choose to join Sylvera, and what are your favourite things about working here?
It’s cheesy, but every step of the way I spoke to people who were incredibly curious, kind, and really interested in making sure whoever joined the organisation was a good fit. There was a lot of thought about putting in place deliberate time for improving your skills and sharing discoveries with other team members, and that kind of culture of collaborative learning makes a big difference in a person’s quality of life. Ultimately you spend a lot of time working, so you want to make sure you feel it’s meaningful (and at least a little fun!)