At Quantium, we work together with clients to provide them with data-driven solutions to their commercial problems. My area of responsibility is in product analytics where I work in a team of analysts and engineers to analyse the clients’ data and build a set of processes, called a pipeline, that transforms the data into an easy-to-use form to provide insights for the client.
At the start of each day, I have a meeting with my team in what is called a stand-up, where we would give each other updates on the progress of our work and raise any issues that would block our progress. As an analyst, I would work on different sections of the processes in the product where I would assess the quality of the data we have (e.g. are there data errors or missing values), make note of any dependencies the data may have (e.g. the data gets updated every week on a Wednesday, so anything related to Thursday in that particular week won’t be available), and develop steps and calculations to transform the data into the required form for the next section of the process. I will then collaborate with the engineers in my team to integrate my work into the pipeline and ensure that it is compatible with what the engineers have developed and expected. For example, ensuring that the code is written in the expected language, or ensuring that the data I need is coming from the same source that the engineers have established a connection to.
I grew up in South-West Sydney where I have spent most of my education in until I went to university. I have always been interested and good at mathematics and was looking for a career in that field. I decided to pursue an actuarial degree since it combined mathematics with business which I thought would be interesting.
During my time in university, I did a case competition hosted by Quantium, which was where I had my first experience in working with data to solve business problems. I enjoyed working through cleaning the data, interpreting the meaning of the data and was fascinated by the insights I was able to draw from it.
I then had the opportunity to join Quantium as an intern where I was tasked to re-work a modelling pipeline that was written in R, SQL and Shell. Given that I had never written code before, I was incredibly nervous about working on this project and feared that I would not be able to complete it. However, as I gradually understood what coding is and how to code (with the support of my team), I began to enjoy the project and built a new passion and interest in coding.
Hoping to continue to develop my coding skills and work with data, I joined Quantium as a graduate where I have now been working for almost 3 years.
Someone with a different background can absolutely do my job. At Quantium there are analysts from a wide range of backgrounds (e.g. law, computer science, psychology, astrophysics). If you have a passion for problem-solving and are willing to challenge yourself to develop new skills, then you can do any job you want.
The coolest thing about my job is being able to work together with people in different roles (e.g. engineers). It is interesting to see the variety of problems that each person is solving (that as an analyst I won’t normally work on) and how each piece of work comes together to deliver the solution for our clients. From this, I have been able to learn different ways of thinking, new ways to code and the different tech stacks and tools that exist to help deliver solutions to our clients.
There have been instances where the scope of the project would change to varying degrees - from a piece of work being no longer needed to the whole project needing to be replanned. This would sometimes break the momentum of my work and I would have trouble shifting focus and context to the new scope of the project.
Despite the difficulty, I always get through it with the support of my team as everyone will face the same challenge. We would work with one another to help build the momentum again and continue working towards completing the new scope of the project.