November 19, 2019
Employee Spotlight: Martin Carrillo
The talent of our team is unmatched. So much so, that our team in San Mateo, Boston and Bulgaria work seamlessly together. What is it like to be a part of our revolution? Today, we’re pleased to introduce you to Petar Staykov, BI Architect at AtScale.
What is your role at AtScale? What excites you about it?
A: My role at AtScale actually encompasses many different roles which is the most exciting part of what I do. When you work in such an innovative company, you need to do whatever is needed in order to make magic happen. Let me illustrate this. One day I act as QA and test new functionality delivered by our brilliant engineers and the next day I am conducting interviews trying to select the best talent we can find to add to the team. There are days when I need to apply the knowledge from my past experience and I try to put myself in the shoes of our customers so that we can deliver a better product that will suit their needs. Personally, I love the days when I’m delivering internal training to my colleagues in order to share my experience with them. The dynamic and challenging environment at AtScale brings nothing but excitement to all of us. But, getting back to the original question – my official position is BI Architect as data and turning data into knowledge and wisdom is my thing.
How long have you been working with AtScale?
A: I have been with AtScale for a little more than five months.
How did you get your start working in the technology space?
A: It is a funny story. My father is a Bulgarian language teacher and my mother is a pharmacist. But in school mathematics was the best subject for me. So, I broke the family tradition and decided to pursue a career which nobody in my family had done before. In Bulgaria, where families are kind of used to interfering in their childrens’ choices, it did seem crazy at the time. But this is how I became a software engineer which led to my Masters degree in Business Intelligence (BI). Afterwards, I became a Business Intelligence consultant.
Prior to working at AtScale, you worked at the Coca Cola Hellenic Bottling Company. Talk to us about that experience.
A: The biggest part of my career was in Coca Cola. It was 2008 and we were a team of seven consultants building all the analytical reports needed by the business. My passion to understand the challenges of the business and solve them using technology, fueled business trips all over the world from Dublin on the West, Vladivostok on the East and we even reached Lagos on the South. At that time from the initial stage of gathering the requirements from all those locations to building a live report in the productive system there was a several month gap. By the time I decided to join AtScale, I had slowly progressed through several different roles and until a few months ago I was leading a department of around 40 BI consultants, data engineers and data scientists, and we were developing and supporting one of the biggest data warehouse implementations in Europe. Although the gap I told you about had decreased from several months to several weeks, this was still not fast enough for a modern data-driven organization. With more people on the team, we could distribute the work and achieve faster delivery time but we were still limited by the old fashioned data warehousing and ETL concepts. We had to spend days and weeks gathering the data, massaging and orchestrating it, moving it from one location to another and finally delivering business insight which well may be not valid any more. During these years, I was evaluating many platforms and solutions that we can use, but nothing on the market could solve this problem. Until now.
What sets AtScale apart from other solutions? What makes our Cloud OLAP technology unique?
A: AtScale really solves many of the problems I have seen in the past. It is a virtual data warehouse that reduces the time needed for heavy data movements in the traditional data warehouse world. It is data platform agnostic meaning no matter where your data resides AtScale can connect to it. It is also BI tool agnostic, meaning that business users can consume the data with their tool of preference and not the one selected by the IT department. Now, the IT department still has a key role to make sure the semantic model is properly built and KPIs are defined in one repository thus ensuring the single version of the truth, but the data engineers are freed from having to do all the analysis.
Many companies are suffering from a data silo problem. Sales departments have their set of platforms, tools and reports and Finance departments have their own etc. And when the CEO asks the simple question such as “How many products we sold this year versus previous year?” or “Which are my most profitable customers?”, he receives as many different answers as people he asks. The universal semantic layer of AtScale solves this problem. The Autonomous Data Engineering™ layer reduces the time to market of a report significantly. And, the AI-driven acceleration structures layer ensures performance. We are disrupting the Big Data market. We are allowing business of all sizes to become data driven at scale. And this is really exciting.
Do you have a “proud moment” that you can recall since you started working at AtScale?
A: Definitely, but it’s not only one moment. For the last five months I gave an interview for a webinar in Bulgaria that disrupted the local beliefs about BI and how hard it is to use it; I pitched my ideas on how to further enhance our product to C-level executives; and I managed to build a great team. But the proudest moment that immediately pops up is my first working day at AtScale because it gave me the opportunity to work with truly fascinating professionals with impressive backgrounds and clear vision for the future and the innovations it will bring. This working environment resembles an incubator where best practices, ideas, beliefs and values are shared and it empowers each of us to grow and learn more.
Describe AtScale in three or four words.
A: Disruptive, Revolutionary, “A” Team.
It’s the weekend! Where are people most likely to find you?
A: Ask any of my colleagues and friends in AtScale and you will know the answer – off road! I love it when I move straight from the office desk (or home desk…) to my 4×4 and find myself again somewhere amidst the beautiful Bulgarian mountains. Dirty roads, hot springs, lush forests and crystal clear lakes – you name it, I will bring you there! Bulgaria is one of the best countries for off road lovers, however, I have also heard that the US is a very good destination for my hobby too. My time in AtScale so far strikingly resembles numerous off road weekends – an adventure which starts with the freedom to think outside the box, take the road less travelled and bring new perspectives to the horizon. This brings me back to the first question – what excites me about working at AtScale. It’s pretty clear now, isn’t it? 🙂
Thank you, Petar! Interested in meeting the rest of the team? Keep an eye out for our next employee spotlight interview, here on our blog!
Check out our past interviews:
NEW BOOK