Gerardo Parrello

Glovo is the app that allows you to get the best products of your city in a few minutes. We connect users, businesses and couriers to make that possible. The project was born with the aim of transforming the way users acquire what they need, making cities more accessible.

Originally joining the central Data Engineering team to manage all data pipelines for the company using Luigi and Jenkins as orchestration stack, and Redshift as our data warehouse. The technical decisions taken at the time were not the best fit for a company that was growing as fast as Glovo did, and soon enough the team started evaluating new technologies to replace them. Moreover, the amount of time dedicated to support stakeholders and maitain existing pipelines was too high, and I made it my personal objective to reduce this as much as possible. This lead to the creation of a first support team that would take over triaging of requests and gave our team room to grow and engage in the transition to the next stack.

In this way, and with the introduction of a data mesh architechture, the team moved on to build the platform that allowed all newly created data domains to build and manage their own data products, using Airflow for orchestration and Trino and Glue as data lake, thus becoming the Data Platform team. A side effect of the transition to a platform team was the introduction of knowledge in new technologies, in particular Kubernetes, ArgoCD and Terraform for infrastructure as code.
My main objective within this team was to design, implement and oversee all Trino infrastructure. This infra continues running until today, with several clusters serving hundreds of thousands of queries per day.

Letgo provides a marketplace that allows users to buy from, sell to and chat with others locally. The products launched in 2015. By September 2015, its app had two million downloads and half a million product listings. In 2017 it was the second fastest growing app in the U.S.

My main objective consisted on providing stakeholders inside and outside the company with relevant data in a timely manner, managing over a hundred pipelines in Airflow that deliver all the data necessary —pulling from tens of databases and external sources, and hundreds of domain events— to our internal customers —data analysts, data scientists, trust and safety and customer care agents, finance and high management—.

PayXpert is a fintech company currently expanding its team in Barcelona, with offices in several countries. It provides its customers with electronic payment solutions.

Worked-on projects include:

• Design of custom ETL pipeline to perform automated bank reconciliations.
• Implementation of a company wide open source Human Resources Management solution.
• Implementation of automatic data retrieval from FTP remote sources using VPN and SSH keys.

During my time as a freelancer for this clients, I worked on the following projects:

• Developed an ETL pipeline from Zendesk to a MySQL instance in AWS RDS
• Deployed Grafana to an AWS EC2 instance to plot data in real-time dashboards
• Implemented Odoo 8 (formerly OpenERP)

My partners and I created a shoes brand that produced locally. We managed everthing: from building the site from the ground up to logistics, finance and marketing. While the company didn't reach the goals we initially planned, here's what I learned:

First, you need to sorround yourself with people that have not only complementary skillsets but also personalities. Partnering with someone is like marrying. Choosing the right people is key.

Second, you can't engage into building complex structures in an early stage startup. Thats how I know I'm not fit for them anymore. I need the basics covered so I can specialize.

And last, obstacles that you don't account for are going to come up all the time. You need a lot of grit to deal them.

Northweek is a start-up that was recently acquired by a major glasses brand. I was in charge of building the accounting team, as well as implementing infrastructure to start delivering accounting statements and reports.

Engaged in field work focused on audit reports for the following clients, among others: Artificial Solutions, DSV: Global Transport and Logistics, Omnicom Media Group, Ricoh, Tourline Express, TRAM, Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics.

Ubiqum is a respected coding academy. It specializes in Java Full-Stack and Data Analytics. The Data Analytics course lasts five months and was designed by the programme heads from Carnegie Mellon and learning scientists from Northwestern University. Some of the projects I worked on were:

• Investigating customer buying patterns and predicting profitability
• Market basket analysis: discovering association between products
• IoT analytics on energy consumption
• Predicting indoor location through WiFi signals
• An API + Dashboard to receive and plot results of a datathon