MDS Newsletter #47

Hey folks,

We are back with the MDS newsletter to keep you up with everything that's been happening in the data space. This week we have covered interesting reads about new approaches for your data teams, how Airbnb approached data reliability, and the challenges of building self-service data platforms.

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Featured companies of the week

• Hopsworks is a data platform for ML with a Python-centric Feature Store and MLOps capabilities. It can be used as a standalone Feature Store, manage, govern, and serve your models, and develop and operate feature pipelines and training pipelines.
  
  Hopsworks brings collaboration for ML teams, providing a secure, governed platform for developing, managing, and sharing ML assets - features, models, training data, batch scoring data, logs, and more.
• Singularity Data is an early-stage startup that innovates the next-generation database systems. The company develops RisingWave, a cloud-native SQL streaming database for modern real-time applications.
  
  Singularity Data has raised a total of $10M in funding over 1 round. This was a Seed round raised on Jul 9, 2021.

If you want us to feature your favorite tool, go and like them here.

Featured data stack of the week

• Swile is a digital solutions provider for employee benefits with an all-in-one smartcard and an app for team life. Swile Cards are the all-in-one card for all your employee benefits. Meal vouchers, gift vouchers, and mobility benefits are on one single smartcard that automatically pulls from the right account. Swile recently reached unicorn status after raising $200 million, just four years after its launch.
  
  Here's how this french unicorn has set up its data stack.

Good reads and resources

• The Data Business Partnership: When data practitioners work with the business teams, their role gets limited to just providing data to these teams so that they can make important business decisions.  This equates their providing data to providing a service and the practitioners get stuck in the role of the service provider, which leads to burnout. Instead, Adam Stone suggests a new approach- data business partner (DBP). The DBPs should work closely with the business team managers and help them in better decision-making by bringing data perspective to the table. The DBP should share accountability for that team’s objectives and results, becoming a stakeholder in that team’s success.
• Data in Practice: Data reliability tips from a former Airbnb data engineer: The major roadblock for companies who want to become data-driven is data quality/reliability. 'How to maintain the data quality' still remains the most asked question by companies using data to formulate their business decisions. A lot has been written about data reliability but how to practice it in real life? Bigeye team spoke with Dzmitry Kishylau, a former member of the Trust and Safety team at Airbnb, to learn how they approached data reliability. Dzmitry shared the data reliability problems they were facing, what steps they took to overcome them, and the results and unexpected challenges they faced along the way.
• Lessons I Learned From Building Self-Service Data Platform: Traditionally data platforms are built, maintained, and iterated by central teams who manage both infrastructure and data. This creates a lot of dependency on these teams. This is why many organisation starts distributing their data ownership, meaning each data owner is responsible for building, maintaining, and operating their data pipelines. This seems to be a really great idea, making data owners self-dependent, but implementing the same is very difficult. Manvik Kathuria pens down the challenges of building self-service data platforms and how they can be overcome.  

Upcoming data events and summits

• Gartner is hosting 'Gartner Data & Analytics Summit' from August 22 – 24, 2022 in Orlando, FL.
  
  Data and analytics are now vital to business strategy, adding significant value to digital transformation initiatives. Gartner Data & Analytics Summit addresses the most significant challenges that data analytics leaders face as they build the innovative and adaptable organizations of the future.
  
  Know more about the event here.

Data startup funding news

• Explo raises $12M in Series A funding round.
  
  This round of funding was led by Craft Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures, Amplo VC, and various industry angels.
  
  Explo was founded in 2019 by Gary Lin, Rohan Varma, and Andrew Chen.

MDS Jobs

• Madison Reed is hiring a '(Senior) Analytics Engineer'
  Location: USA
  Data Stack: dbt, Looker, Snowflake
  Apply here.
• Translucent is hiring a 'Lead Data Engineer'
  Location: Remote, UK
  Data Stack: Fivetran, Bigquery, dbt
  Apply here.
• Ophelia is hiring a 'Head of Data'
  Location: US
  Data Stack: dbt, Looker, Snowflake
  Apply here.

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