Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Ola: Hey, I’m Olamide, but you can call me Ola for short! I grew up in Kerry, South-west Ireland. I’m currently studying Global Business at Trinity College Dublin and I’m really passionate about entrepreneurship and business strategy- even more so after completing this internship!

Arjun: Hi, I’m Arjun and I’m a first-year student at UCL studying Statistical Science (a subset of maths and computing). I’m interested in how businesses operate and new technologies!

What is your death-row meal?

Arjun: Three chicken shawarmas. (Probably)

Ola: Oh that’s tricky.. I would probably say a Thai fried rice dish.

What motivated you to apply for this internship?

Ola: This internship opportunity stood out to me because of its unique structure. Not only do you delve deep into the world of venture capital & private equity at MMC, but you also get hands-on experience working in one of the most prominent UK food-tech companies, Gousto. I wanted more of a professional experience in the start-up world and it was also a great opportunity to explore the city of London!

Arjun: I originally applied to step into a new professional space for 4 weeks and learn valuable career skills. The internship, which was advertised in partnership with one of Gousto’s investors MMC, appeared as a great opportunity to simultaneously learn about the financing and operational elements of nurturing a scale-up. It has certainly lived up to this!

Could you tell us a bit more about your time at Gousto?

Arjun: Sure. We spent two weeks with Gousto. Our first week was filled with introductions to new teams and our two projects: one was centred around technology and the other on sustainability. Littered in-between, we shadowed the customer care and legal teams as well as meeting with senior staff sitting in technology. This helped us understand the fundamentals of Gousto’s operating structure and teams. We were also lucky enough to get involved with some great fun cooking in the kitchen. We each made and tested two dishes with the recipe development team (many thanks to Matt, Marcus and Elle). Following this, we had a two day sustainability hackathon; over to Ola.

Ola: We ended the first week with a hackathon, focused on developing sustainability initiatives within Gousto’s operations. It was amazing to see such unique solutions being developed by the different teams in just two days! The second week (unfortunately the last one), was definitely one to remember. We did personal & career development coaching sessions, a CV & interview masterclass and had meetings focusing on the final presentations of our technology and sustainability projects. We also got to visit the Warrington production factory, which was an incredible experience (thanks to Benjamin). It was amazing to see the cutting-edge technologies that create the signature boxes, the patented ice-box and the tech that ensures that the right food products are allocated to the correct customer’s box. The level of automation honestly took me by surprise and it was more apparent than ever why Gousto truly is a data-driven tech company.

Did anything inspire you at Gousto?

Ola: What inspired me is how much the company is committed, not just to the product but also to its people. There’s an extensive range of initiatives focused on maintaining the employees’ overall wellbeing. This includes wellbeing initiatives, quarterly ‘superdays’ (dedicated to celebrating success), engagement surveys, DEI workshops, and even a ‘no meetings week’ which enables people to focus on deep work and learning. The culture here is definitely a true embodiment of the ownership principles — everybody is dedicated to learning continuously, they focus on delivering high quality outcomes and they put the customer at the centre of every decision. I’ve even noticed how environmentally-conscious I have become… talk about the chameleon effect!

Arjun: The ownership principles. Gousto breathes ‘Dream, Deliver, Care’ and this was the key consideration across every department we spoke with ranging from Customer Care to the Technology teams — there was rarely a meeting where this trinity was left unsaid. I found this reflected in our internship experience as well: we had a lot of autonomy and flexibility in our day-to-day which allowed us to take ownership during our time here. Although we did set poor boundaries on a fair few meetings (sorry Zara and Chris), this was a really valuable learning experience in time management (amongst other things).

Have you discovered anything that you plan on taking further?

Arjun: I think so. Data science is a practical application of my degree and prior to interning, I hadn’t really seen the tangible impact that this field makes. During my time at Gousto, I enjoyed hearing about the creativity in data-science and the unlimited potential of data. I now look forward to selecting course modules to help me learn more!

Ola: For me, the business’ strategy is something that intrigued me and I would love to explore strategy consulting in the future. Whether it was in customer care, tech or risk & compliance, every team’s operational processes all centred around achieving specific goals. I appreciate how the value delivered by the individual teams accumulates in a way that achieves the overall company objectives.

Is there anything else that you want to add?

Ola: We are so grateful to everybody at Gousto for making us feel welcome from day one, and for teaching us about their roles. Thank you Louisa, Eve, Abigail, Matt, Marcus, Zara, Chris and everybody else across the company. Also, a big thank you for putting up with our many….many questions.

Arjun: We’re thankful to the teams at Gousto who made themselves open to us, particularly to Louisa and Eve who provided invaluable help across the period in getting the ball rolling. This was a unique and rare opportunity which I feel very lucky to have been a part of!

Want to learn more about what the Gousto Tech team get up to? Click here and follow us to keep up with all the latest news!

The ever increasing complexity of data in our digitalised world means that companies are investing substantial parts of their resources in talent that can navigate these pools of information. For someone who is interested in a career in data, the amount of opportunities and various roles that are out there can therefore often seem overwhelming.

As part of our blog post series on the different data roles at Gousto, we will take a closer look at BI Developers and Data Engineers today. We have spoken to Elena Martina (Data Engineer) and Sarah Lier (Senior BI Developer) to learn more about what they do. They are part of the Data Platform team at Gousto (nicknamed “Passionfruits”) which consists of Data Engineers, Analytics Engineers, BI Developers and a Business Analyst.

What are BI Developers and Data Engineers?

Elena: An engineer’s role is to design, build, and maintain the systems or infrastructure to solve problems. As such, Data Engineers are the designers, creators and maintainers of optimised systems for collecting, moving, storing, and organising data at scale. Our main goal is to create a single source of truth (in Gousto’s case, in our Data Lake) for the users of our data and provide them with highly reliable, usable data in near real time.

In my team, Data Engineers take care of getting the data from different sources, loading it into our Data Lake in an unrefined “Raw” layer, then processing it into a second “Cooked” layer (we’ve got food puns everywhere!). In the Cooked layer, data is stored in Delta and it’s cleaned, partitioned, and optimised for querying. Transformations and modelling of this data happen afterwards from “Cooked” to “Served”, thanks to our Analytics Engineers and BI Developers.

Imagine a chef getting their groceries, bringing them back to the restaurant and organising them in the most efficient way for them to be ready and available when the restaurant opens and the orders start. They will make sure that all the ingredients are there, and they’re all in perfect condition (no incorrect spices or damaged veggies!), as well as arranging them in the best way to save storage space and make them easily reachable when needed. That’s kind of what we do… but with data!

Sarah: A BI Developer — in a quite literal sense — develops business intelligence through various analytical and visualisation tools, for example Power BI, Tableau, Looker or Sisense. The resulting reports enable stakeholders and the wider business to make crucial decisions based on historical data, present trends, and forecasting.

If the chef in Elena’s example makes all the ingredients available, then a BI Developer would take over from there. They would mix the ingredients, make a delicious pasta bake, and then serve it to our stakeholders

Does your role definition vary from company to company?

Sarah: Yes, because the data journey at a company depends on the company size and the maturity of its data department. At companies with less complex data sets or a more rudimentary data infrastructure, the BI Developer often does the job of a Data or Analytics Engineer, too. This means that you will also ingest, transform, and model the data before you plug it into an analytics tool. The more advanced the data team of a company is, the more structured your responsibilities become. However, this does not mean that BI Developers and Data Engineers are completely separate but we will get to that later.

Elena: Exactly what Sarah mentioned! The role of a Data Engineer in a company is very dependent on the company size and the maturity of its data team. The role and required skills also vary by company, as it heavily depends on the scale of data that’s being ingested, the types of data sources (different skills will be required for different use cases) and the latency requirements of their data users (does your company need real-time, streaming and/or batch data?)

How did you become a BI Developer and Data Engineer?

Sarah: I have a background in humanities and wanted to pursue a career in academia which did not happen in the end for various reasons. It was therefore time for a career change, so I thought about what else I like. I remembered that I always enjoyed my Computer Science, Maths, and Physics classes at school. At the same time, I observed the growing importance of data to companies. I subsequently joined a market research company as an Analyst where I got to use Power BI for the first time. From there, I found my way into BI.

Elena: Funnily enough I have an early background in humanities too, however I had always been more the analytical type and I never quite fit in. Participating in a project for women in Tech inspired me to pursue a career in Tech and follow the path of the amazing women I met there. I decided to come to London to study Computer Science at university; during my third year I got closer to Data, and I realised it was the space I wanted to work in.

I was initially looking for Machine Learning Engineer roles; however, since landing my Data Engineer role at Gousto, it’s been such an interesting, rewarding and fun role, that I haven’t looked back to Data Science.

You’re both part of the Data Platform Passionfruits team. What does your typical day look like in Passionfruits?

Elena: You’ll usually find me starting my day around 9am, sipping a warm cup of moka pot coffee in front of Slack while answering messages, planning my day and maybe reviewing a few PRs. Twice a week, I join an optional team-wide morning “coffee and chit chat”, which is a good way to ease into the day and catch up with everyone.

Standup with my feature team is at 10am, which is when my team’s core working hours actually start. It is usually followed by a refinement, sometimes a retro, or people splitting up in a pairing session to continue a discussion, task or issue brought up during standup.

After lunch is when I usually have time to focus on the projects I’m working on, either on my own or pairing with a colleague. This afternoon, I’m continuing to work on an ML Ops project, which will enable Data Scientists to easily deploy their Machine Learning models to Databricks using dbx.

Sarah: Our typical day consists of team tasks, individual tasks and then what I call ‘Gousto extra-curriculars’. Our team tasks often come in the form of meetings, for example retros where we talk about how we are progressing against our OKRs and tech slots where we present what we have been working on.

On an individual level, I have a lot of technical work which is about the development of reports for our stakeholders. However, as I am at a Senior level, I then also work on the bigger picture for our team and the business. I own OKRs, think about larger problems, and come up with solutions.

Our ‘Gousto extra-curriculars’ consist of voluntary activities, for example contributing to our TechBlog. Elena and I also co-organise get-togethers and are involved with the Women in Tech at Gousto working group.

What skills are most crucial for your job?

Sarah: It’s a mix of technical and interpersonal skills. In terms of more fundamental technical skills, you need to know what entity-relationship models are and how relational databases work. Once you have a good grasp of that, you can dive into the more specific technical skills, i.e. the actual business intelligence tools. As they are all fairly similar, you can usually be an expert in one tool, for example Power BI or Looker, but then still join a company that uses Tableau. Many tools use SQL, though Power BI runs on DAX and Sisense includes elements of JavaScript. Again, if you understand how one language works, you can easily pick up on another one.

Then there are the interpersonal skills. As a BI Developer, you are often the face of the Data team and spend a lot of time liaising with stakeholders. Your stakeholders are not always technical, so you need to be patient and never assume that they know what you know. I like the comparison to declaring variables when you code. The computer may not know that ‘age’ is an integer, so you need to declare it. Another way of approaching the role of a BI Developer is the service-angle. I think of my work as providing a service to my colleagues which means that I am very invested in their needs.

Elena: In the two years I’ve been at Gousto, the most useful skills have been the ability to learn fast and get comfortable quickly with new tools and technologies, while keeping up with what’s new in the Data space. Being able to pair and collaborate with other engineers, communicate with technical/non-technical people, problem solving, and the love (or laziness?) for automating everything you do.

What tools do you use for your job?

Elena: Gousto is an AWS house, so we use a lot of the services it offers. To integrate with and collect data from our sources into our Raw layer, we use AWS lambdas (for APIs or message buses) or DMS (for databases). AWS S3 is where we store our data, and we use AWS Glue as our data catalog.

Most of our Data Platform relies on Databricks running on AWS: we use it as the orchestration tool for our Spark Streaming jobs, and it’s also used by the entire Data team to query our Data Lake through its notebooks or Databricks SQL. Our Databricks jobs are deployed through Databricks Labs’ DBX. As a Data Platform team, we also own the whole Databricks infrastructure and setup, which we manage through AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit).

CircleCi is the tool used across Gousto for deployments, and Github actions for automations. Last but not least, Miro is a whiteboarding tool for architecture design and collaboration!

Sarah: The Analytics tool we use at Gousto is Sisense. My background is in Power BI and I had dabbled in Tableau before, so Sisense and JavaScript were new to me when I joined Gousto. I also use Databricks to test our data before I plug it into Sisense or to model raw data tables that should not sit in a BI tool. Moreover, I am currently learning dbt which goes into Elena’s world but which is super interesting and helpful if you want to make changes to a data model without getting an Analytics or Data Engineer involved.

Who are your key stakeholders?

Sarah: My key stakeholders are a mix of technical and non-technical people. On the more technical side, I usually work with Data Analysts, whereas stakeholders from outside the Data team can be anyone from Logistics, Operations, Finance, and so on. It’s quite exciting because it means that I get to know all kinds of different people and departments at Gousto.

Elena: My stakeholders can be any team in the business that uses our data or needs data from a new source ingested in our Data Lake, from marketing to software engineers to data analysts. I also closely support Data Scientists, which I help with queries, model deployments and new data or feature requests.

At times we are our own stakeholders, as I often work on platform improvements and adding new tooling to make my team’s life easier, while adding value and functionality to our Data Platform.

How do BI Developers and Data Engineers interact with each other?

Sarah: Within a Data Platform team, Data Engineers are essentially the ‘back end’ whereas BI Developers are the ‘front end’. Then there are Analytics Engineers who sit in the middle. Data Engineers essentially ingest or integrate data from different sources to consolidate them into one view, usually a data warehouse or lake. The Analytics Engineers then transform and model the data so it is ready for use. BI Developers then take the data and analyse it through BI tools.

At Gousto, all three roles are part of one team (Data Platform) which means that we work together very closely. For example, as a BI Developer I would approach a Data Engineer and ask ‘Our stakeholders need this type of data. Is this available? If not, is it possible to make it available?’

It is important to work together so we can maintain a clean data pipeline and develop a fully integrated data stack. Our end goal is accurate and healthy data that travels smoothly from its starting point to the finishing line.

Elena: I couldn’t have said it better myself!

What advice would you give to someone coming into your profession?

Elena: In terms of technical skills, I would recommend getting some Cloud experience, learning python or Scala, Spark, SQL, and understanding of Cluster Computing and IaC (Infrastructure as Code). In general, don’t be scared or conditioned by your background or skills. Data Engineering is often highly dependent on the data and the systems a company has already in place. No matter how many Data Engineering courses you take beforehand, you will learn a lot of it on the job. So when you’re applying for a role, don’t worry if you don’t “tick all the boxes”. Keep up to date with the latest technologies in the space, choose which ones you want to learn, and apply for the job where you can use them!

Sarah: Just because you did not study a science — or data-related subject at university, it does not mean that you cannot become a BI Developer. There are plenty of free online resources that you can use to obtain training, for example YouTube or edX. If there is an opportunity to ‘buddy-up’ with someone from the data team at your company and get some hands-on training, go for it!

Check out more stories from Gousto and make sure to follow us here, so you catch our next article. While you’re waiting for that you can check out this post that looks back on everything the tech team did in 2021!

What is the difference between a BI Developer and a Data Engineer? was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of a series where we compare professions. We interviewed Joe Berni (analytics engineering) and Jenny Smedley (business intelligence manager) to find out more!

What made you want to get into analytics engineering / BI development?

Joe: Interestingly, I only discovered I really wanted to become an analytics engineer after I became one. After starting out initially as BI developer/data analyst, I soon learned that I had a greater interest in the technical aspects of data roles over the actual data analysis.

Jenny: At the omni-present school career fairs, I had; physio, french wood polisher and occupational therapist come up as the suggested careers. So it is a bit of a surprise that I ended up as a senior BI manager. However, the role does allow me to do many of the activities I enjoy the most; juggling multiple tasks, engaging with stakeholders, and of course bossing people around — only joking!

What does your typical day look like?

Jenny: Every day is very different so it’s tough to describe a typical day. If I had to summarise; checking in with my team to make sure they are OK / if there is anything I can help them with or blockers I can remove would be high on the list. Then getting on with my own work, whether this be a strategy document, resource planning proposal or a good old fashioned bit of troubleshooting some code. At the end of the day, I always try to tie off any loose ends ready to start again the following day.

Joe: I start the day with the usual stand up discussing any blockers & key things I have achieved the day before — making sure there is plenty of time to catch up on all things not work related also! I will spend time on-boarding some of our data analysts/scientists to dbt as-a-product, an initiative that allows all data professions to interact with dbt @ Gousto. Work on a given project that may contain data modelling, the creation of a data pipeline, and reviewing GitHub pull requests from data analysts who are making changes to our data models.

What skills/tools are most crucial for your job?

Joe: Being able to understand the technical aspects of data and explain them to all stakeholders, no matter the technical knowledge of the audience. It also helps if you’ve got strong SQL skills, coupled with Python, dbt, git & experience working in an agile fashion. We also use Databricks & AWS (Redshift, Athena, etc), as well as general tools like Slack & Miro.

Jenny: I work with technical tools such as Sisense and Periscope — but for working up proposals and business plans, nothing beats old fashioned Google-sheets / Google-docs or Google slides. I do find Miro boards useful for initial planning as well

Who are your key stakeholders?

Jenny: Theoretically, anyone at Gousto who rely on the tools to enable them to perform their role, as well as our third party suppliers who provide our BI tools. On a day-to-day basis, I mainly work with the BI developers, analytical engineers and data analysts

Joe: Anyone in the business who wants to get their hands on data or make use of Databricks or dbt.

How do your two professions interact?

Joe: As an analytics engineer, I am responsible for building the core models that BI developers use to build their Sisense dashboards. We often work with the BI team to understand their stakeholder requirements and ensure that the data we provide them fulfils these. BI developers also get involved with dbt as-a-product, and work closely with us to make changes to our models or create any new ones they might need.

Jenny: Analytical engineers are essential to BI development. They build and model ingested data for us and recently have been working closely with my team to enable us to model some of the tables ourselves, reducing time taken for dashboard development. They are also often our first point of call if an issue is spotted within a dashboard

What advice would you give to someone coming into your profession?

Jenny: Be curious and adaptable — it’s a fascinating world as there are usually multiple ways to do something so you are always learning. As a manager, I value different opinions and ways of looking at things so never think you have to conform to a particular model or persona — just be yourself. I am a strong believer that you can develop any skills as long as the person has the willingness to learn

Joe: Be inquisitive. I personally believe the strongest attribute of a good Analytics Engineer is asking WHY we do things the way we do and HOW they can be improved. Don’t worry about not having experience with every bit of the modern tech stack. Companies often list 10+ tools they use and it can be daunting as somebody looking to enter the space. Most of these tools can be picked up very quickly, and it’s far more important to be curious and want to learn than it is to have experience in every tool.

Check out more stories from Gousto and make sure to follow us here, so you catch the next instalment in our series of “What’s the difference between…”.

While you’re waiting for that you can check out this post about the experiences of two Gousto interns.

What is the difference between an Analytics Engineer & a BI Manager? was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of a series where we compare professions. We interviewed Robyn Turner (data analysis) and Priscilla Reagan (business intelligence development) to find out more!

What made you want to get into data analysis / BI development?

Robyn: I love making sense of the world through concrete facts and statistical accuracy. Data analysis is the perfect opportunity to do this — especially with the sense of surety that comes with using SQL. I really enjoy uncovering issues and opportunities by bringing together an array of data from different sources to paint a fuller picture that would be meaningless in isolation.

Priscilla: Visualisations speak louder than words and I love the fact that I can produce impactful visualisations that will help business in decision making. We have the platform to reveal trends, opportunities and problem areas that will shape the future of the business.

What does your typical day look like?

Priscilla: I start the day with slack, checking the various support channels to address Sisense queries if any. Calendar is my next stop to check the meetings for the day and planning focus. A typical day is a mix of team stand-ups, meetings with stakeholders to gather requirements for BI solutions, connecting with the data engineers to identify the relevant models to deliver the solution and working with data analysts to understand the data and requirements better. Housekeeping the BI reporting environments is a part of our daily activities.

Robyn: Working on ad-hoc tickets, like pre or post-experiment analysis or campaign targeting. More strategic roadmap items, like understanding more about customer skipping behaviour or a deep dive on changes to the order rate. Meetings to catch up with stakeholders, map opportunities and present findings.

What skills/tools are most crucial for your job?

Robyn: Most important is the ability to use SQL — it forms the foundation for data analytics, as it allows you to retrieve and manipulate data for analysis. Having a good grasp of Excel/Google sheets is useful. We also use Databricks, Periscope and Sisense. Other important skills are multitasking, stakeholder management, prioritisation and the ability to work in an agile way.

Priscilla: Expertise in a scripting language (like SQL, Python) is the basic requirement. Experience with data visualisation libraries is also crucial. Perception of the underlying data warehouse architecture, data integration tools (ETL/ELT process) will be useful on the job. We build our dashboards in Sisense and use dbt and Databricks for modelling. We heavily rely on Miro, Slack and Google Meet for team collaboration and Data Team rituals.

Who are your key stakeholders?

Priscilla: At Gousto, BI are a foundational team serving all parts of the business. So our key stakeholders are data analysts, finance, fulfilment operations, human resources, senior managers, and the list goes on. Anyone in the organisation looking to make data driven decisions!

Robyn: At Gousto, data analysts are each embedded in a certain part of the business. In my area, our key stakeholders are colleagues that work in marketing and product. Supporting them through experiment analysis and identifying opportunities/problems that can be harnessed/solved through efficient comms and superior product design.

How do your two professions interact?

Robyn: At Gousto, interaction with BI developers is picking up as we migrate from using Periscope to Sisense. With an analysts knowledge of the data and stakeholder requirements, we can liaise with BI to make reporting come to life. This allows stakeholders to have more visibility of the data.

Priscilla: Data analysts help us understand data better and deeper in order to provide the right information in the dashboards. We talk to data analysts from the initial stages of the dashboard development cycle to help in modelling, through to the final stages to assist in testing the derived information.

What advice would you give to someone coming into your profession?

Priscilla: Being a BI developer gives you the opportunity to code as well as be creative in visualising data. It also provides the best platform to understand end-to-end business functions. In a nutshell BI developers role presents one with the best of both worlds (Technology and Business).

Robyn: You don’t always have to have the fanciest technical background and be proficient in an array of languages to excel at being an analyst. Focus on being curious and capturing a coherent story behind the data and you can make a big impact!

Check out more stories from Gousto and make sure to follow us here, so you catch the next instalment in our series of “What’s the difference between…”.

While you’re waiting for that you can check out this post about how to run a Gousto analytics hackathon.

What is the difference between a Data Analyst and a BI Developer? was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of a series where we compare professions. We interviewed Harrison Ford (analytics engineering) and Daniel Baron (data engineering) to find out more!

What made you want to get into analytics engineering (AE) / data engineering (DE)?

Harrison: I became an AE organically — I began my career in statistics/analytics, then by taking on problems outside the scope of my role I found I had an interest in data modelling and warehousing. When I started my career in data the term AE was unheard of and I became one by gravitating towards interesting problems and then solving them.

Daniel: I’ve always enjoyed solving problems and had a curiosity of things I don’t understand. Having strengths in maths & science led me to completing a computer science degree, during which I found DE appealing to me due to it always being on the cutting edge of what technology can do in a commercial setting.

What does your typical day look like?

Daniel: I start the day by catching up on admin before attending our team stand up, after which I’ll often have a call with one of my teammates to refine any work. After lunch on alternate days we have tech slots — think design sessions, demos or ways of working workshops. They can be really good for getting help, aligning the team to resolve recurring problems, or promoting a cool new tool you found on reddit. After that I try to keep my afternoons free for ‘Makers Time’ — essentially, time to focus and get stuff done.

Harrison: We have a very similar way of working to DE — at Gousto we are all members of the Data Platform team — after all, so we share many of the same ceremonies. Within our current feature team (which is currently all analytics engineers, by chance rather than design) we pair a lot in our work so much of my day is filled with collaboratively solving problems. Our day-to-day work is very varied and can range from working on our self-service products, to working with business users of our data to figure something specific out.

What skills are most crucial for your job?

Harrison: Collaboration, problem-solving and communication would be my top three. A healthy dose of knowing SQL, dbt and data modelling best practices helps too! Like with DE, there is a fair amount of technical work so it is key to be comfortable solving difficult problems.

Daniel: Strictly speaking, this is a technical role and so an appreciation of how to use tech to drive objectives and key results — you have to be highly analytical to solve problems. I think the most overlooked, yet equally important skill, is how you collaborate and work with others — this is crucial to delivering anything of significance!

What tools do you use for your job?

Daniel: People usually expect a list like Python, Spark, AWS here but I’d probably start with Google Meets, Miro, Confluence and Slack. Before a single line of code can be written we need to be able to effectively collaborate to refine and design what it is we’re building. We need effective ways to engage with our stakeholders to understand what it is we need to do to help drive the business forward. Then of course, that eventually translates itself somewhere into our tech stack which mainly consists of Databricks running on AWS with Spark Structured Streaming. We have broad use of AWS services as a standard at Gousto and we have a great platform that allows us to deploy these in just a few lines!

Harrison: My answer is very similar to Dan’s — knowing how to effectively use everyday tools like Miro and Slack are invaluable and will save you a lot of time! Specific to the AE role at Gousto is dbt and Databricks, which we use daily, and sometimes we can be found working with data pipelines or a BI dashboard. One of the great things about working in the data team here is you aren’t siloed into a specific role — you have the freedom (and are encouraged) to learn new skills.

Who are your key stakeholders?

Harrison: A stakeholder for us is anyone who uses the data we are providing via our models. This could be a data scientist, a data analyst, a business intelligence developer or anyone who is using a dashboard/analysis built off of our models. We also have stakeholders in the form of people looking to learn about and use dbt in their day-to-day work. Our dbt-as-a-product project has been ramped up in recent weeks as we look forward to onboard as many people as possible to enable them to self-serve their own models!

Daniel: As a recipe box company we have a growing network of factories, each producing a ton of data by the minute. I spent the first nine months of my career at Gousto aligned with our Supply tribe (now called Unbox) and therefore my key stakeholders were mainly centred around our factories. I’ve since moved into our core data platform team focused on ingesting web event data, so our stakeholders here are more interested in things such as app experimentation.

How do your two professions interact?

Daniel: For me, AE is the other side of the same coin and I’ve certainly worked on projects where we’ve almost been joined at the hip! Different projects require different ratios of AE:DE, but I found myself working heavily with AEs when focused on the delivery of factory KPIs. This meant I had to ensure the correct data was provisioned and cleaned prior to the AE picking up a KPI that required said data.

Harrison: We rely on DE to provide accurate data in the lake for us to base modelling on. Without their pipelines we would have no data! We will often jump on calls with each other to resolve issues regardless of the titled ‘role’ — the line between the two gets blurred as we pick up skills from each other. Indeed we’ve even had people migrate from one discipline to the other — we’re encouraged to follow our own interests.

What advice would you give to someone coming into your profession?

Harrison: Keep asking questions, no-one expects the new AE to be an expert in the subject matter or the technology (regardless of level). Over time you should be looking to learn things about the data you’re working with. The great thing about working with data is the diverse range of companies that you can work with! Try to stay up to date with the latest technologies, becoming an expert in yesterday’s technology is probably not ideal. If a process feels slow and painful, find a way to make it faster!

Daniel: DE can be challenging due to having to work with a vast set of technologies, which can feel overwhelming at times, especially when you’re more junior. Don’t let this worry you too much, but make sure you take the time to try new things out and if you find something of value, don’t hesitate to try and push the idea forward. As you progress, don’t let your technical competencies be your only competencies otherwise you’ll quickly stagnate. Find yourself a good mentor and try and focus on your softer skills for a bit, this will really change how you interact with others, making your working relationships more fruitful, increasing your ability to influence and ultimately, help you to get things done!

Check out more stories from Gousto and make sure to follow us here, so you catch the next instalment in our series of “What’s the difference between…”.

While you’re waiting for that you can check out this post about how Data Platform team go about setting their objectives.

What is the difference between an Analytics Engineer and a Data Engineer? was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of our series interviewing members of our Gousto Tech team. In this post, we meet Yasmin and Adam, who have just finished a month-long internship with Gousto and our investor, MMC Ventures.

What’s your favourite food?

Yasmin: Anything with potatoes in it — but in particular lamb and potato stew with rice!

Adam: Has to be lasagne!

Can you tell us a little about what you’re currently studying and your interests?

Yasmin: I’m currently studying Bioprocessing — it’s basically the study of living cells and applying them to healthcare, sustainability and food products. I’m very interested in new technology and techniques that can improve the cost of goods, time spent and the production process generally.

Adam: Hey, I’m Adam! I’m studying Physics at UCL and I’ve recently become really interested in tech and programming, specifically in python. I’m currently studying a few relevant modules and projects to this, so it seems this internship couldn’t have come at a better time.

Why did you decide to apply for an internship at MMC?

Yasmin: Aside from my interest in tech, I am quite interested in finance — inspired by my brother! So MMC offering something that combines my two interests was perfect. I loved that we could see the outcome of their investment and spend some time with one of their most successful tech companies, Gousto.

Adam: For the same reasons as above, the Gousto part of the internship really stood out to me as I was hoping to get some experience in tech, and understand how a tech company runs. MMC sounded really interesting as I had never heard of venture capital before applying and had never had any experience with finance, which I never knew could be so enjoyable!

What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto during your internship?

Yasmin: Everything was great! From the shadowing of customer care to writing up our own tech and sustainability projects but overall… I think cooking in the kitchen and shadowing the food team was the most exciting! It was amazing to see exactly how Gousto works behind the scenes and the amazing people creating new recipes within guidelines.

Adam: Definitely the cooking session. Aside from just being good fun, I got to see first hand how great of a product the Gousto box is.

Can you tell us about one cool thing you’ve learnt at Gousto during your time with us?

Yasmin: One cool thing I have learnt about Gousto is the scale of its tech innovation. In the beginning, we were surprised to hear a food delivery service was considered a ‘tech-first company’, but seeing the effort put into analytics, optimising the factory line, the Gousto app and even the way recipes are recommended was surprising to see!

Adam: On the surface Gousto just seems like a food delivery company, so I was really surprised at how important tech is to the company. The fact that it’s used for everything, from optimising the website, to self-service customer complaints, to even picking out and identifying new recipes for customers, was so so interesting to me!

Are there any areas you’ve come across at Gousto that you might be interested in exploring further?

Yasmin: I would love to explore analytics further as well as financial positions that deal with AI. One thing’s for certain, I would love to work for a tech company like Gousto in the future!

Adam: Anything related to data science and analytics. The way every aspect of the business is being optimised to such high levels using data is something I find so cool, and would love to do more work towards!

Want to learn more about what the Gousto Tech team get up to? Click here and follow us to keep up with all the latest news!

Comparison between the pizza base and the toppings of the data meal

This is the first in a series where we compare professions. We interviewed Carmela Brook (data engineering) and Rita Figueiredio (data science) to find out more!

What made you want to get into data science / data engineering?

Rita: I studied Biomedical Engineering in university, a super broad degree with knowledge from all areas from physics & biology to maths & programming! So by the time I was choosing my MSc I was still a bit clueless about what I wanted to become. When I started working on things like predicting melanomas from skin lesions, or predicting diabetic retinopathy from diabetic patients’ history, I figured that was what I loved — to solve problems using past data. When I started working I moved away from the health sector — causing my parents a bit of a heart break — to industries where Data Science was growing more steadily, but using large amounts of data to predict the future remained the common denominator!

Carmela: After graduating university I had no idea what I wanted to do. I took an interest in data from reading blog posts online and stumbled upon data engineering. At the time, I was more familiar with what a data analyst or data science role entailed but hadn’t heard of data engineering. I liked that it was more concerned with the storage, movement and transformation of data — enabling others to harness it, as opposed to using data to make predictions or extract insight. This was well suited to my chemical engineering background, which was concerned with the exact same aspects but on chemicals instead of data. I knew immediately my skills would be transferable.

What does your typical day look like?

Carmela: We have a large data platform team and we operate in small quarterly feature teams, focused on delivering a set of OKRs. This may involve; building new engineering improvements, adding features to our existing data platform, ingesting a new data source, or building data pipelines so that stakeholders can access the data in a useful format. We might also be on-call to provide operational support to stakeholders, solve any production incidents in our platform and fix any identified bugs. We aim to pair with other engineers when working on new tickets and frequently have design sessions to collaborate with the entire team on architectural decisions.

Rita: Our data scientists are embedded into cross functional squads. I work in the Haricots squad within the Care Tribe, which has the goal of making sure customers feel valued and have their problems solved quickly, with a smile! I am currently working on optimising the compensation we give our customers when there is something wrong on their box. My day depends on what stage of product development we are at — in the discovery phase we will be brainstorming with the relevant stakeholders, in the exploratory phase we will be discussing approaches with other data scientists and exploring the data, while towards the end of the development cycle we will be collaborating with our squad’s software engineers to productionising models.

What skills/tools are most crucial for your job?

Rita: If we’re gathering data from our data lake then we’re using Spark/SQL. If we’re doing data exploration then we’ll use Python on a Databricks notebook. Whereas when we move to the product development phase we’ll be working in an IDE, and using CircleCi, Cloudformation, AWS and Databricks to deploy our products. Having product vision, understanding the domain and working on the relationship with the stakeholders are the most crucial skills to be a good Data Scientist!

Carmela: Python, SQL, Spark, Linux, Databricks, Delta Lake, AWS, Docker, CircleCi (CICD), Cloudformation (IaaC). It is also important to be able to break down complex problems into small, manageable pieces. Good communication, to be able to adapt your technical language to suit your audience and ask the right questions. Teamwork and an overall eagerness to learn.

Who are your key stakeholders?

Carmela: Our key stakeholders are the rest of the data team — this includes data analysts, data scientists and data governance. This list is expanding as we build more use cases for serving data to operational systems e.g. CRM which involves new non-technical teams such as marketing.

Rita: As a data scientist embedded in our Customer Care Tribe, my main stakeholders are my squad’s Product Manager, as well as the Director and Head of Customer Care.

How do your two professions interact?

Carmela: There is a lot of interaction between data scientists and data engineers — we may get questions about data access, data quality or requests for new data. Typically, data scientists will use more features in Databricks to iterate through the machine learning life cycle, therefore we receive more queries relating to Databricks — productionising ML models, orchestrating jobs, managing dependencies, etc. Demand for this kind of support has grown so large it’s becoming its own role — MLOps.

Rita: Couldn’t have said it better myself!

What advice would you give to someone coming into your profession?

Rita: Besides investing in constant learning and development, what will make you stand out as a data scientist is to be passionate about the product you’re working on and having a vision of what it could be in the future!

Carmela: Keep learning and stay in tune with what’s in the data community as the landscape is forever changing!

Check out more stories from Gousto and make sure to follow us here, so you catch the next instalment in our series of “What’s the difference between…”.

While you’re waiting for that you can check out this great example of data science & data engineering coming together.

What is the difference between a Data Engineer and a Data Scientist? was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of our series interviewing members of our GoustoTech team. In this post, we meet Mhairi who is a Business Analyst in Data Engineering.

What is your favourite food?

Tough question! Probably carbonara or anything pasta based 🍝

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gousto.

Hi I’m Mhairi! I’m a Business Analyst (BA) in data engineering (DE) at Gousto. I started in our Starfruits squad, which was focused on ingesting and modelling supply data, but now I work across all sorts of data engineering projects.

Being a BA in data engineering is a very interesting but also wide reaching job — you have to be a jack of all trades! The main objective is making sure that the work we’re doing is providing real value, whilst acting as the translator between the business and engineering teams.

It’s also a lot of making people talk to each other, or ‘facilitating conversations’ — whatever you want to call it!

How long have you been at Gousto?

I started in April of 2021, so about a year now.

Can you tell us a little about your journey before arriving at Gousto?

I studied economics at uni, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it honestly just seemed like a good catch-all. I ended up loving econ, and will still engage in any sort of game theory discussion, but it was a bit too theoretical for me to consider pursuing it full time.

So I joined a technology trading grad scheme at a bank. That’s where I learned how engineering projects are managed (or not 👀) in the real world, and got interested in data.

Prior to Gousto I was mainly working on software engineering projects in big data and analytics, but I dabbled in some data science too.

What made you decide to join Gousto?

I wanted to work somewhere where I was closer to (and more passionate about) the end product. Plus the tech stack is significantly more interesting to me than the legacy systems I was working with before!

What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto since joining?

I’ve worked on a wide variety of technical projects since working at Gousto, but the most exciting (and challenging) thing was probably starting our Starfruits squad 🌟

A large concentration of requests coming into DE were to help make operational decision making more data-driven, so we spun up a specific squad to ingest and model that data. It’s not easy to start a data engineering squad from scratch, but it’s safe to say that we all learned a lot in the process.

What’s in the pipeline that you’re excited about at Gousto?

Work on sustainability initiatives! In the next few quarters we are ingesting and modelling data to help the company measure different sustainability metrics. Stay tuned to find out more 🌍

How would you describe the culture at Gousto?

When people ask me this in hiring interviews I always answer ‘surprisingly relaxed’. We’re a very ambitious team in DE, we’ve got a lot to do, and I think with all of that considered the culture is surprisingly relaxed. You’re trusted to get your work done.

Why would you suggest that someone considers joining us at Gousto Tech?

Join for the technical challenge and exposure to exciting problems, stay for the free food!

Meet the Team at Gousto Tech — Mhairi Grant — Business Analyst was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of our series interviewing members of our GoustoTech team. In this post, we meet Dom who is a Senior Data Scientist in our Unbox tribe.

So tell us, what is your favourite food?

Ooh this is a tough one. If I think about one thing I couldn’t live without it would probably be pasta in all its wondrous forms.

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gousto.

I’m Dom, a Senior Data Scientist in Gousto’s Unbox tribe — our tribe’s mission is to deliver the best possible unboxing experience for our customers.

In terms of my role this means developing and maintaining the various algorithms we use to optimise our factory processes, such as deciding how we set up our production lines and route boxes down them, or how we move ingredients through our factories to ensure that our lines are always well stocked. If we do this well we can ensure that the boxes get to the customer on time and in great condition, while maintaining the high level of throughput needed to meet our demand.

Aside from time developing our operational algorithms, I often find myself providing advice and analytical support to stakeholders on all manner of operational topics, such as how to manage our production lines while ramping up a new factory, or what functionality might we need from a future factory that is years away from opening.

How long have you been at Gousto?

I’ve been at Gousto just over two years now — I actually joined on the first day of lockdown which was quite the experience!

Can you tell us a little about your journey before arriving at Gousto?

I have a maths and operational research background, and have previously applied these skills while doing data-sciencey things at British Airways and McLaren Applied Technologies.

What made you decide to join Gousto?

A couple different things appealed when I decided to apply. My previous companies had been large, old institutions, which could often make the pace of delivery quite slow. I was keen to try somewhere that was a bit more agile, and as a company entering the scale-up phase, Gousto seemed like a good fit.

Additionally, after a long and interesting discussion with our old Director of Data, I was excited by the prospect of applying my skills to some of Gousto’s problems. From a supply chain/operational perspective, Gousto is quite a unique and advanced organisation while still having so much scope for further optimisation, which appealed to my intellectual curiosity.

What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto since joining?

I’ve worked all across our operations focussed Data Science areas since joining so I’m lucky to have worked on quite a few exciting projects. One that stands out is our project to move from a single site to a multi site operation. This involved coming up with and then building a couple separate data products to help us decide which recipes we hosted at each site, how this would affect our order routing, and how we would reflect this decision in our forecast, which now had to be done at both an aggregate and site level.

This project was memorable not just because of its huge business impact (it unlocked a lot of capacity at a time we were experiencing strong growth), but also because I learned a lot myself, particularly how I would approach a similar project in the future when under time pressure.

What’s in the pipeline that you’re excited about at Gousto?

We have a few big areas of focus in Unbox Data Science for the coming years.

We are planning to make our data products more dynamic so they’re better able to adapt to changing conditions in our factories, as well as broadening their scope to optimise for multiple operational objectives such as throughput, labour cost, and OTIF.

We are also spinning up a simulation squad to build in-house replications of our factories, enhancing our ability to scenario test algorithm improvements and proposition changes.

How would you describe the culture at Gousto?

The culture is generally very friendly and social, which I enjoy. People are encouraged to speak honestly and challenge each other regardless of their seniority, which I think is particularly important for fostering innovation as well as keeping employees engaged.

Gousto prides itself on being a ‘data company that loves food’, and while I think it’s perhaps a bit unrealistic to be data driven in all decisions, Gousto does a pretty decent job of holding itself to those standards.

Why would you suggest that someone considers joining us at Gousto Tech?

If you love food and tech then it’s the place to be! We have a huge amount of interesting and unique problems to solve and we’re constantly growing in all areas of tech, so if you’re interested then please have a look at our open roles.

Meet the Team at Gousto Tech — Dom Wigmore-Shepherd — Senior Data Scientist was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s the first of this series and we’re kicking off with the iOS Foundations team! We are currently a team of 5, and we manage everything from the underpinnings of the application in Swift, to our physical CI systems, the glue that manages them and a number of web systems. We are responsible for most of the infrastructure and architecture which helps the iOS product teams effectively perform their roles. We are cross functional in a lot of ways, from managing our own CI infrastructure and tooling, to improving core functional and architectural components in the app, to kicking off design system initiatives, building web dashboards and much more. Our ‘customers’ are generally other development teams within Gousto and so we strive to make their job as easy as possible.

Katie Jones — Junior iOS Developer

Hey, I’m Katie and I’ve been working at Gousto for just over a year. I don’t really have a ‘before Gousto’ story as this is my first developer role! However, I did switch from human languages to programming languages in my last year of university and hastily changed my proposed Masters study from teaching to Digital Humanities in the space of a month and I haven’t looked back since.

On a personal level, I am a HUGELY active person. I regularly hike, and have trekked up mountains in Japan, Switzerland, Canada and France. I came close to falling off the edge of a mountain in Canada a couple of years ago, but it hasn’t stopped me. Other than hiking, I train as a figure skater at my local rink in Slough and also took up rock climbing with my partner a couple of years ago.

I joined the iOS Foundations squad on a more permanent basis towards the end of 2021. Before this, I moved around 3 squads in our Growth tribe, contributing to the resurrection, retention and care of our customers. Since joining the Foundations team, we’ve improved some of our core iOS functionality such as our Flow Coordinator concept, built dashboards in Javascript, and are now exploring a GraphQL proof of concept in TypeScript. The thing I enjoy most about Foundations is the enthusiasm to take on a new tech stack and develop things that will really benefit others in the rest of the iOS team.

The Foundations team implemented a design system last year which aligns with one of my interests at the moment — reusability, in particular, design systems and how to improve developer speed by implementing reusable components, guided by clear standards. My aim for this year is to add more components to our design system and reduce as much boilerplate code where possible.

If I had to choose one thing that I love about our iOS team as a whole, it would have to be the push for learning as opposed to shipping features quickly. Especially for juniors, it gives us the space to explore and learn from mistakes and this is crucial in the first couple of years in the industry.

Dale Buckley — Senior iOS Developer

I’m one of the senior iOS developers on the iOS Foundations team and have been with Gousto for just over a year and a half. I’ve been dabbling in tech for as long as I can remember, but I really started to get into programming when tinkering with modifying computer games and making websites back in the mid 2000s. Once iPhone OS (yes, it used to be called that prior to being renamed to iOS) 2.0 got released and Apple started to allow 3rd party developers on to the platform I got interested in making iPhone apps. I don’t have any formal education in computer science so everything was self taught. I was originally working at my family business after finishing school, but in 2011, and after making some hobby apps, I decided to leave and switch to making apps full time, and as they say; the rest is history.

Since joining we have made huge inroads into reworking the project structure to enable us to scale and the project is now heavily modularised. Teams can now work on their own part of the app through the use of feature apps and not have to worry about building the entire codebase every time due to module caching. From this work, we have managed to improve our CI so it only builds the modules that it needs to reduce the amount of time each CI build takes to run. Also, we have built out a dashboard containing over 30 different metrics which allows teams to see how the health of their code changes over time. This could be documentation, code coverage, EOL (End Of Life) conformance, PR size, merge reliability and much much more. Teams can then use this data to influence their development directions and prioritise areas of improvement.

From a personal perspective the most satisfying areas I’ve worked on since joining Gousto have been taking low level areas of the app and reworking them with modern, clean and well documented APIs. There is still a long way to go in this area, but I’m happy with what we have achieved so far.

By far the best thing about working at Gousto is my team. We are always very open with each other and always strive to help each other out. There is very much an unspoken ‘no one left behind’ philosophy in the team where from the least experienced to the most experienced we always try to help each other understand both problems and solutions so anyone can pick up a task. Other than the team, I just really like what Gousto is aiming to do. The company aligns with my values in trying to cut emissions, waste and generally trying to be better for the world. There are always internal initiatives promoting diversity and openly recognising when things aren’t quite going to plan.

Sara Sipione — iOS Junior Developer

Hi I’m Sara and I joined Gousto at the beginning of 2020 as a Junior iOS Developer! About 4 years ago I decided to move to London, looking for a new and exciting experience that could enrich my cultural background. Two years in, I decided I wanted to then change my career and made the transition from Marketing to pursue a career in iOS development. I spent my time learning how to code myself and building iOS applications by attending coding bootcamps. Months later, a new adventure started at Gousto.

Since I joined Gousto, I’ve always worked as a member of the iOS Foundations team. Working with the core of the iOS Gousto app is really exciting and challenging at the same time, especially now that the application has been used by over 1M people in the last year.

Being part of the Foundations team is like jumping in a new role every 4 months. Learning about the latest in Swift, Ruby, Typescript, app architecture, fastlane, CI, app release process, debugging and solving issues.

In two years I can definitely say I’ve noticed the progress we’ve made in our app architecture and developers’ productivity. This was possible thanks to great work on code modularisation which facilitated the scaling of the app, and by automating most of the process for releasing new features.

The thing I’m most proud of is the Codebase health report, a collection of metrics describing how the codebase of the iOS app is changing over time, used already by developers and managers to prioritise engineering improvements on their roadmap.

Another important team effort was the design and implementation of a widget prototype which is now available in the iOS Gousto for all customers. If you still don’t have it, please add it to your iPhone and let us know what your experience is. My colleague Katie has written a blog post on that. Check it out here!

Sebastian Skuse — Lead Engineer, iOS Foundations

Hi, I’m Seb! I’ve been working at Gousto since 2019, and working with iOS products professionally for quite some time (back to when it was called the iPhone SDK in 2008!). Prior to joining Gousto I have led teams at a number of other household name brands in industries ranging from digital publishing to video streaming for UK broadcasters. My passion for programming started in school, when I discovered Microsoft Office came with a cut down version of Visual Basic in it and I could build “programs” in it. That evolved into VB6, Pascal, C++ and then into web technologies in 2000 which set me on a course for studying Computer Science at the University of Southampton. In my spare time I’m kept busy running after a 3 and a half year old and a 15 month old, and am an avid petrolhead.

I head up the iOS Foundations team and joined Gousto to help with scaling the project as the business grew — things have changed a lot since 2019! There were 3 iOS engineers when I joined, now we’re at 13. To support this growth we had to split mobile engineers out into domain teams, with a foundational team supporting them. Our project (now workspace) had to change to support this too, moving to a number of separate projects at different API levels building domain-owned frameworks to produce the app you see in the AppStore today.

One thing I love about the work we do in the Foundations team is the variety — we own code written in Swift, Bash, Ruby, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript & more. One of the greatest things about working in the team is the enthusiasm everyone has! We’re often faced with challenges outside of our intrinsic iOS domain knowledge, but we all pull together to support each other and deliver. We hold regular guild meetings with all of the iOS team where we discuss what’s new in iOS, our domains and provide support cross-squad, too.

One of my favourite features that we’ve built is our selective build + test functionality. As we’ve grown as a team, so has our codebase and UI + Unit Test suite. We identified that this was going to cause us problems long term as we don’t want to cut down the number of tests engineers were adding, and the codebase is always going to end up growing organically. We wanted to approach this in a way that was completely transparent to our engineers, and did not require them to switch away from the standard Xcode project. First, we implemented something we call “Module Cache”. Our workspace is structured in a way where we have groups of projects, and those projects are only allowed to import from levels below them — enforcing a tree structure and providing different “API levels”. The outputs from these projects are periodically cached on CI, and when a new build is started, it resolves the dependency graph and determines which prebuilt products it can swap in for their source counterparts, saving build time. Secondly, we’ve implemented Selective Testing. We use Test Plans at Gousto, and using a similar mechanism to Module Cache, we work out the changeset graph and disable any test bundles in frameworks that are not relevant. These two changes together mean that, for some builds, a CI build takes 20% of the time it did before.

Spencer MacDonald — Mobile Engineering Manager

I originally joined Gousto in 2017 to help scale up our native mobile team from 1 to 6 engineers across iOS and Android, and since then we have scaled to 25 mobile engineers spread across 6 squads, which has kept me and the team on our toes throughout. When we were 6 engineers I used to contribute a handful of pull requests each month to the app, but my team has now forbidden me from touching the codebase!

My day to day role is as an Engineering Manager for our iOS and Android Mobile Foundation Teams, ensuring we have a vision that aligns with our growing team and ability for all mobile teams to ship customer value as often as possible. I also represent the needs of mobile (such as laptops, test devices, CI, team shape etc) with the rest of the software engineering management team, along with undertaking responsibilities that all Engineering Managers share, such as ensuring our teams have a clear strategy and unlocking what’s needed to get there and supporting individuals with their personal development.

Prior to Gousto I worked as a Lead iOS Engineer at a number of startups, using a variety of different technologies, working in areas such as real time audio, video and messaging.

The iPhone was launched during my last year of Uni (that doesn’t make me feel old at all!), so as I was already obsessed with all things Apple, it was the natural thing for me to jump into when I graduated from my Computer Science degree and I have never looked back.

And that’s all from iOS Foundations. Next time, you’ll meet the iOS Activate team!

Meet the iOS team — Foundations was originally published in Gousto Engineering & Data on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.