Zach Wilson is a tech lead at Airbnb building data pipelines, previously he worked at Netflix and Facebook. Zach graduated from college at the age of 20 with degrees of math and computer science. He has over 80k followers on Linkedin.

We talked about common data engineering mistakes, best practices, softskills, how to say no at work, work experience in Facebook, Netflix, and Airbnb. This is part one of our conversation, and please go to next week’s episode for part two. If you like the show subscribe to the channel and give us a 5-star review. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on www.dalianaliu.com/ for more on data science.

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Zach's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eczachly/

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:43) How did he get into DE

(00:01:23) Data Infrastructure vs Data Engineer

(00:02:44) Day-to-day at Airbnb

(00:05:57) How much data science should DEs need to know

(00:10:07) Common mistakes of DEs

(00:14:53) Good questions to ask stakeholders

(00:18:10) Communicating with data scientists and software engineers

(00:20:39) Frustrations when working with data scientists

(00:24:34) Setting up processes

(00:26:22) High-quality pipeline

(00:28:42) High-impact data engineering project

(00:33:13) Mistakes he made early in his career

(00:38:14) Core DE skills that juniors must know

(00:40:50) How to go to the next level 

(00:44:15) Meeting his mentor

(00:46:02) Some advice from mentors

(00:48:00) Best advice about influencing without a title

(00:49:45) Working at Facebook, Netflix, and Airbnb