Modern Data Engineering & Architectures

The online world we interact with today is increasingly powered by data and by insights extracted from that data. Our ever-growing thirst for data insights and data-driven behavior (e.g. ML-based systems) is driving our industry to collect data more often from an increasingly varied set of sources. With increased amounts of data, scale becomes a challenge. To complicate matters further, customers want reliable access to high-quality data and insights. This adds availability and data quality to our list of requirements. More often than not, customers require low-latency as well, often referring to the time it takes raw data to be converted into usable insights or production-grade models. Last but not least, access patterns and use-cases dictate the form data will take when being served!

Depending on how the data will be used, the medium used to store and serve it will vary widely. OLTP/OLAP DBs, caches, object stores, search engines, graph DBs, data streams, vector DBs, and the like represent the many forms data takes to be suitable to its many uses. Come to this track to learn about new technologies, practices, and trends shaping the way you will work with data.


Track Host

Sid Anand

Fellow, Cloud & Data Platform @Walmart, Apache Airflow Committer/PMC, Ex-Netflix, LinkedIn, eBay, Etsy, & PayPal

Sid recently joined Walmart (i.e. Walmart Global Tech) as a fellow to work on all things data. Prior to joining Walmart Global Tech, Sid served as the Chief Architect and Head of Engineering for Datazoom, where he and his team built high-fidelity, low-latency data streaming systems. Prior to joining Datazoom, Sid served as PayPal's Chief Data Engineer, where he helped build systems, platforms, teams, and processes, all with the aim of building access to the hundreds of petabytes of data under PayPal's management. Prior to joining PayPal, Sid held senior technical positions at Netflix, LinkedIn, eBay, & Etsy to name a few. He earned my BS and MS degrees in CS from Cornell University, focusing on Distributed Systems.

Outside of work, Sid advises early-stage companies and several conferences. Once an active committer on Apache Airflow, he is now mostly a fan.

Sid's body of work includes but is not limited to :

  • The world's first cloud-based streaming video service -- I was the first engineer to work on the cloud at Netflix
  • LinkedIn's Federated Search Typeahead (a.k.a. auto-complete)
  • LinkedIn's (Big Data) Self-service Marketing Analytics tool
  • PayPal's DBaaS - an internal self-service system to provision & manage heterogenous databases
  • PayPal's CDC - an internal self-service CDC system to stream DB updates to nearline applications
  • eBay-over-Skype : Following the Skype-acquisition, I built a P2P version of eBay offers
  • eBay's Best Match Search Ranking Engine powered by an In-Memory Database
  • eBay's Fuzzy-match name/email Search
  • Agari's Data Platform : Batch & Streaming Predictive Data Platform as a Service
  • Datazoom's Platform : High-fidelity, Low-latency Streaming Data Platform as a Service
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