The peek into the everyday of Telia’s Senior data engineer: embracing complexity among clouds, data lakes and pipelines
Data plays a significant role in Jovita Revollo's professional life - having spent almost 10 years in the IT field specializing in data, she now holds the position of Senior Data Engineer at Telia. But – Jovita tells – it was not she who has chosen data engineering – rather it was the other way around – the turn in her professional life she is very happy about. We talked with Jovita about her road to data engineering, her job at Telia and the inner workings of this fast-evolving profession.
First of all – how did you get into data engineering? Was that your first career choice? Or did you go through some searching?
While I initially pursued financial studies, my path took an unexpected turn towards data engineering. After a gap year in Australia post-graduation, I returned to Lithuania with a shift in career aspirations. Lucky for me, there was an opening position for DevOps internship program in one of the UK Banks in Vilnius and I got it. That’s where I learned about Data Engineering and successfully started my career.
More and more people get interested in data engineering. Though there is still some confusion about the job specifics. Could you tell us a little bit about your work at Telia?
I am a Senior Data Engineer in Data Platforms Capabilities Team at Telia Lithuania. My main responsibilities are developing new data pipelines and integrations for our new AWS Redshift based warehouse and AWS S3 based data lake solution. Aside from that, we also have our legacy Hadoop based data lake where we store sensitive information which we expose to Law Enforcement Agencies. Part of my responsibilities include maintenance and support activities for this legacy data lake.
Many believe that data engineering is just a fancier word for a specific type of coding. How truthful is this assumption? What competences do you need in your daily work?
If data engineering was only a coding job, it would be way too easy (smiles). Data engineers have much more responsibilities – starting with requirement gathering, raw data analysis and exploration, helping with solution architecture, creating new pipeline integrations and continuing with collaborations with data scientists and business analysts, exploring new tools and technologies and only then – the easiest part – actual coding (smiles).
It really sounds like a teamwork. What does your team look like? How many different specialists work with you?
Our team mostly consists of data engineers though it also includes delivery lead, service manager, data mapper, solution and domain architects, ML engineer and several business analysts who join us virtually to help with business requirements, data analysis, mapping and building business layer in the data warehouse. It is a very dynamic work environment with plenty of opportunities to grow and learn from one another.
How about collaboration with other teams and departments? Does that happen a lot?
Everyone in the organization needs clean, structured and easily accessible data. It would be difficult to list all the departments we are collaborating with. Though the key stakeholders for us are business analysts and data scientists.
Jovita Revollo took a turn that led her to data engineering and she never looked back: “I found the world of endless opportunities”
What specific projects are you working on? Which one was your favourite so far and why?
My primary role involves developing a new Data Warehouse and Data Lake in the cloud. One standout project involved setting up a UAT environment in AWS, significantly improving development and testing processes for our team. This initiative had a significant impact as it provided a reflection of the production environment, facilitating smoother workflows for data engineers, business analysts, and data scientists. So, it had a really big impact for the whole company.
Finally, why did you choose Telia for your professional self-realisation?
For me the most important aspects when choosing a company to work for were the availability of cutting-edge technologies and the complexity of assignments. I can confidently affirm that Telia excels in both these aspects. From deploying and leveraging the latest technologies to handling the intricacies and substantial volumes of data within Telia's systems, the company consistently proves itself at the forefront. Without reservation, I would recommend Telia in Lithuania to any data specialist seeking opportunities to learn, grow, and embrace new challenges.
Thank you for your time!