Making a Career & Country Change: Arturo’s Journey to Becoming a Senior Data Engineer at Devoteam G Cloud

In this series, we’ll put the spotlight on Devoteam G Cloud’s experts who are always at the forefront of driving progress in the exciting and rapidly evolving Google Cloud world. In this article, we delve into Arturo’s journey as a Senior Data engineer in Belgium and the challenges he faces in his role.

Meet Arturo, a talented senior data engineer at Devoteam G Cloud.

Graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2016 in Venezuela, Arturo started his journey as a software engineer. But when a job opportunity presented itself at Devoteam G Cloud in Belgium, Arturo seized the chance to expand his career and take on a new challenge.

A Journey from Venezuela to Belgium as a Data Engineer

Arturo’s journey as a data engineer is a story of determination and a love for data engineering. “After graduation in Venezuela, I moved to the Dominican Republic where I worked for 4 years before making the move to Brussels in search of new opportunities. I was looking to expand my career and take on new challenges.

I stumbled upon a Devoteam G Cloud’s job posting on a job board and decided to apply. I was pleasantly surprised by the interview process. Despite the added challenge of a virtual interview due to timezone differences, I was still enthusiastic about the role.

His story explained in a short video

In this video, you’ll get a glimpse into Arturo’s professional journey, his role at Devoteam G Cloud, and the exciting projects he’s been a part of.

Belgium Bound: Arturo Joins the Data Tribe

Integrating into a social circle or finding a community can be challenging when you’re new to a place, but that was not the case for me in Belgium. I was able to easily connect with people and felt welcomed right away within the G Cloud Team.

In comparison, migrating to a new place and working in a new company can be difficult and sometimes it can take time to fully integrate. However, I haven’t had that experience in Belgium. I’ve never felt like an outsider. On the contrary, G Clouders are just fun and friendly. It’s a warm and welcoming group that solves problems in a collaborative way. The team doesn’t limit itself to just our own tribe and we get to learn a lot from one another.

What does it mean to be a senior data engineer?

As a senior Data Engineer, my main responsibility is to ensure that the project runs smoothly and that I keep everyone informed. My role goes beyond just completing my tasks and monitoring the Jira board. I have a high level of autonomy and the key to success in this role is to keep everything moving forward. 

The best thing about the job?

The opportunities for continuous learning and growth are unmatched. I also value the dynamic and collaborative environment. As a team, we not only absorb information but actively contribute to each other’s growth through the sharing of our experiences and discussing project difficulties. This not only fosters a sense of community but also ensures that stagnation is never an option.

What challenges have you faced in your role as a senior data engineer at Devoteam G Cloud?

One of the biggest challenges is balancing speed with quality. Our projects often require us to improve existing processes while ensuring that they are delivered quickly. This is the case on the RBFA project I’m working on, where I had to learn at the start how to navigate the architecture and make necessary fixes. Devoteam G Cloud has been working on the RBFA project for a long time, and of course, you can’t expect to know everything when you join the project as a consultant. 

One of the ways we tackled this challenge was by documenting our work on a Confluence page. With every new feature, came the added challenge of documenting it and making it available to the rest of the team I am proud of the progress we made on this cool project.

Overcoming Challenges and Accumulating Expertise

Every new challenge is an opportunity to grow and accumulate expertise. Instead of just putting out fires, I focus on using cloud tools and following best practices to improve my skills and become a better engineer overall. 

A Day in the Life of a Data Engineer: Balancing Planning, Meetings, and Hands-On Development to Drive Solutions

This is how one of my days looks like, even if of course every day is different

1. Start the day by planning tasks for the day 
2. Attend short meetings to stay aligned and synced with the team
3. Assign priorities and discuss with customers what needs to be done asap.
4. Focus on building features for projects such as:

• Building a feature store for Vertex AI
• Debugging and fixing bugs in RBFA, tracing root cause, opening tickets, and creating reports
• Creating a data warehouse structure in BigQuery with already architected datasets and tables
• Giving Looker workshops to customers

Crushing Deadlines & Making Dreams Come True

I joined the Unifiedpost project as my first big challenge. This massive project had very ambitious goals and needed a data mart built in less than a month, which is typically a 6-month project. We leveraged technologies such as Airflow, BigQuery, our self-developed Flycs accelerator, and GKE, as these were used to orchestrate the whole process from ingestion to end product. It was intense, as there were only two of us.

We had to build the data mart quickly by grabbing data from different sources, processing it, and making it available in a data warehouse. And we did it!

Our hard work paid off and we completed the project in just over 4 weeks. The customer was thrilled with the outcome and achieved their goals, thanks to our speedy and effective way of working. It was an unforgettable moment of pride for our team. 

Collaboration & fun within the Tribe

The Tribe team is a big, talented, motivated, and fun group of people. We all encourage and facilitate opportunities for learning and knowledge sharing. Whether through regular team meetings, documentation efforts, or simply informal discussions, I believe that continuously learning from each other is a key factor in our success as a team.