Written by: Maria Rodrigues
Reviewed by: Lucas P. Lima
Despite being one of the biggest fintech companies in the world, Nubank always surprises with new concepts, products, and technologies. More than that, Nubank revolutionized the importance of data to guide decisions and support internal analysis. One of the indispensable pieces in transforming the way data relates to teams is the Analytics Engineer chapter.
Dealing with data can be difficult for non technical users at first. Now, imagine a scenario where the amount of data keeps increasing without a proper architecture and a well-defined design. The experience can be worse, even for experts.
As Analytics Engineers, we’re always looking for ways to improve collected data by reducing data cleansing and data preparation steps, providing reliable, scalable data to optimize the pipeline. We need to make our data “Analytics Friendly“.
But what exactly is the career as an Analytics Engineer? That’s what we’ll discover in this article:
What does a Analytics Engineers do at Nubank?
Analytics Engineer (former Data Analysts) acts as a bridge between the Data Infrastructure team and the analytics needs in the squad.
At Nubank, we have a continuously growing volume of data. As we launch new products and more customers join us, we should be able to readily capture raw data, transform it into processed data for experimentation or even analysis, and build pipelines to keep it moving.
The Analytics Engineer team is involved in the maintenance of the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load data), exploratory analysis, experimentation, data governance, building dashboards, and developing KPI metrics.
At first glance, it seems that we need superheroes to tackle data here, right? Almost. Even though the long list of assignments that an Analytics Engineers supposedly has, we’ll see that they carry out in different ways over the squads, which means that gradually those responsibilities are managed along with the job.
Scope of work
Below, we have a glimpse of what the Analytics Engineer does here at Nubank:
Anti Money Laundering
We are not exempt from being victims of attempted fraud. One of the most common is Money Laundering. Being in charge of this can be stressful and difficult to deal with. Lucas Lima, Analytical Engineer since 2019, shared his experience with us:
“In the AML team, we focus on supporting both the analysis and operations teams. We do so by abstracting away technical complexity in data processing, as well as helping to handle an ever-increasing amount of data with performant code and maintainable structures, to improve Nubank’s capabilities of detecting criminal activities while minimizing friction to trustworthy customers.”
Internal Audit
Auditioning could be a nightmare for many companies. But, as we have been describing here, automating and anticipating problems is our main goal at Nubank. The Internal Audit is one of our shining stars. Helder Ronyer, Analytics Engineer since 2018, shared with us the experience that he had helping to build the Internal Audit data structure:
“We focus on improving how the squad deals with data and also automating their work. We’re responsible for integrating the tools the team use with Nubank’s data platform, building solutions/abstractions to automate auditors’ job, such as automatic test processes, getting the results and pieces of evidence saved for auditors to check at any time or constantly checking processes stats so that the team can better decide what needs to be audited or not.”
People & Culture
Last but not least, we love our employees as they are part of our family. The People and Culture team is responsible for dealing with our nubankers in the best possible way. Providing them with agile processes and protected information, they need to keep every piece running smoothly helping to create a welcoming and trusted place to work.
“The People Analytics team is responsible for supporting Nubank’s view of our employees, providing analysis about our headcount, our open positions, our people’s engagement, retention, and so on. As an Analytics Engineer on this team, I’m responsible for creating and maintaining data pipelines for every flow related to this type of data”, details Lorena Borges, Analytics Engineer since 2021.
What are the expected skills of an Analytics Engineer at Nubank?
We expect from our Analytics Engineers the ability to handle data responsibility in terms of data modeling and analysis. In addition, they also contribute to design, implement and document the evolution of our ETL/ELT. Last but not least, handle interactions with our business partners to understand their needs and provide solutions that align with our data platform.