What I learned in building a 10+ member team and an data platform from scratch at Afterpay in 18 months.

1. WHAT WE LEARNED BUILDING A LOVED
DATA ENGINEERING TEAM
NitishMathew
Headof Global Data Engineering& Platforms

2. AGENDA
OUR JOURNEY SO FAR
OUR MISSION AHEAD

4. PRESENTATION | 2018 | CONFIDENTIAL 4
OUR HISTORY BEAPART OF OUR
AFTERPAY JOURNEY!
It’s short

5. “HERE ARE YOUR AWS CREDENTIALS
and 2 ENGINEERS
I NEED A DWH IN 3 MONTHS.”

6. WHAT WE SET OUT TO BUILD
Courtesy: SVDS

7. WHAT WE BUILT IN 12 MONTHS

8. WHAT DID WE DO DIFFERENT?
- Delivery every week.
- Kept things really simple.
- Gave users the tools they want.
- Gave as much as control as possible to users
- Sandbox Schemas – Huge Hit.
- E & L – T mostly by customers.
- Made decisions very fast.
- Tried things fast and moved on, ruthlessly, if they didn’t work.
- Didn’t take any shortcuts on security.
- Knowingly took on tech debt and cleared it as we went along.

9. “HOW DID WE DO?”

11. WHY?

13. “WHAT DID WE LEARN?”

14. 1. DO THE RIGHT THINGS
14
1. Listento what your clients want.
2. Work hard on giving your team
clarity
3. Instill passion for Technology and
TCO responsibility

15. 15
2. DO THEM FAST
1. Incorporate and empower small, self-
contained “youbuild it, you run it”
teams.
2. Infuse radical courage by providingair
cover to make mistakes,learn and
innovate.
3. Invest in DevOpsthinking,tooling and
processes.

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3. ENSURE THEY ARE DONE
1. Reward Shipping stuff.
2. Reward solving actual customer
needs(not cool tech).
3. Rewardcollaborative success to
eliminate the “who gets the credit”
problem.

17. “ENSURE THAT THE
RIGHT THINGS ARE
DONE, FAST”

18. OUR MISSION AHEAD

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WE ARE HIRING!