Designing Data Systems as a Cloud Data Engineer: Meet Ryan

Key Takeaways

what gets me excited about my role is being able to design some of the largest Data Systems in the world hey I'm Ryan I'm a cloud data engineer here at Google Cloud what I love about working in this field is peeling back the covers on technology and data systems and being able to understand what is actually driving decisions and driving the services that I use on a daily basis as an end user as a kid I was always always curious about how things worked and within my role as a cloud data engineer I look at data and try to derive insights out of it and with that uh curiosity that I developed as a kid I'm able to apply that to my daily role where I'm always looking for how to connect different data sets together to help derive better business value for customers when I was a young software engineer I was always me with resistance with trying to push the boundaries within the organization that I was in I was always interested in trying to find new ways of doing things new technologies to apply to common problems and throughout my career I sort of found my path in innovating um uh along the way to actually satisfy that itch for curiosity and Innovation at the time I was making a career transition into a cloud-based role and in order to prepare for that role I did a lot of reading tutorials a lot of watching YouTube videos and then I also built my website on the cloud itself to help me stand out from the rest of the applicants for the role that I was applying for and that really helped me understand a little bit more about cloud services and helped me ramp up along the way I feel like I have a large impact within my role because the customers that I work with are able to provide new features new insights and new data to their customers I face a significant challenge working with a customer in the health industry because the health industry has very high stakes because the decisions that you make directly impact people's lives we had to make sure that our design was very very comprehensive and that we had exhausted all different points of failure such that we were able to ensure that when we went live with the system that we were very very confident that we weren't going to um encounter any issues the margin of error was very very small if we didn't deliver a notification to somebody who needed a notification at that time they wouldn't be able to take the appropriate action such as getting their child to the hospital or getting their child to a doctor that experience helped me grow in my role because it taught me what it takes to deliver on a solution and to never give up ultimately at the end of the day you're not going to always have the answer from the beginning and to be able to navigate through complexities and be able to learn along the way really taught me about perseverance the advice that I'd give to someone starting with in this career is to stay curious there's always so much to learn and so just having that natural growth mindset or that Curiosity really helps you develop uh and become a better data engineer