Welcome to Episode 10 of Tech Leaders’ Intel! This week we’re excited to be joined by Vicky Bukta. She only graduated from the University of Toronto in 2017, but after joining the e-commerce trailblazer, Shopify, her impressive career growth has seen her rapidly rise through the ranks to become the company’s data-engineering team lead.

We begin by discussing how she entered the field and joined Shopify, before moving onto the challenges small companies face as the number and complexity of their data sets grow. For Vicky, overcoming these challenges meant teaching the wider company how to handle routine and detailed queries about data sets, so her team could focus on bigger data-engineering issues. That involved ensuring team knowledge was taken out of people’s heads and recorded for others to find and use, a process that required constant discipline.

It turns out this process is also essential for supporting the growing trend towards remote working as it helps prevent team tribalism of knowledge. Vicky’s team straddles multiple time zones, with some members having no overlap in their working hours, which presents both challenges and opportunities. Not only do we talk about how her team now works together, but we also consider how remote working is increasingly becoming something tech companies must embrace to secure and retain the best global talent.

Finally, we end by discussing how it is more important than ever to encourage women to go into tech from an early age; and why female tech representation in the media is so crucial for this.

If you like what you hear and want to continue the conversation, you can connect with Vicky on LinkedIn or visit her website VictoriaBukta.me