Walter joined Funnel in August of 2021 as the Head of Integration Engineering in our Boston office. He describes himself as a "can-do, creative data guy with product vision and entrepreneurial spirit." We sat down with Walter and asked him some questions about working at Funnel.

Why did you choose to work for Funnel?

When I was first introduced to Funnel, I immediately recognized how valuable the product is, because I used to be a human bandage over some of the problems that Funnel solves (as a career “data person” I have done plenty of data engineering and built pipelines for marketing/product stacks). I found the no-code “data engineering as a service” approach very compelling. I was thrilled to see that Funnel was well capitalized and was at the “scale up” stage, which is a great time to join a company because things are growing and changing and evolving quickly - exciting! When I was interviewing I kept hearing “The Data Operations team is great - they crush it - they’re awesome” and variations on that sentiment, which is a magical thing to hear when walking into a leadership position for a team.

What’s your favorite aspect of the culture at Funnel? 

Funnel culture is unique, with a huge focus on work-life balance and the practice of deep, meaningful team collaboration, which I believe is a winning combination for a company to be a leader in its market space and an incredible place to work. Funnel is a place where if you have a compelling vision you can run with it. As an example of the extent of team collaboration, substantial amounts of code at Funnel was written in mobs, i.e. mob programming, which if you are used to writing all your code alone or perhaps occasionally with pair programming, is a totally new and fascinating way to write high-quality code. Our team codes in pairs and as a mob regularly and it’s a blast. I have never worked anywhere that wrote code this way, I love it. 

Everyone is always teaching each other as well, and that aspect manifests in many ways. For example, most of the engineers on the Data Operations team have had “internal internships” with other teams, where they picked up deeper software development skills, learned more about various parts of the Funnel product’s inner workings, or built adjacent skills such as product design.

What does your team do?

We build custom Connectors that allow customers to connect their unique data sources to Funnel. Each build is exclusively for them. So, we do a lot of “green field” work - learning new APIs, working with exotic transport methods, sometimes writing web scrapers - anything we can reasonably do to get data into Funnel. We write code in Python (e.g. API client development) and use special tools in Funnel’s backend. We also talk directly with customers, working with them through the build process to make sure they get the value they need from the Connector and from Funnel. We mix individual and group working modes to get things done. We collaborate and share information, and teach each other often.

What’s the plan for the rest of 2022 and for 2023?

As the Funnel product covers more use cases, and transport methods, and supports more Connectors, the Integration Engineering team increasingly covers new ground-building setups to get idiosyncratic data sources into Funnel. In other words, our team’s technical requirements are growing in complexity. Over time we solve more customer needs by writing more software in Python and running pipelines on internal Funnel backend tooling. We are also growing in number: we build and maintain thousands of Connectors for our users and that number keeps steadily growing, and our headcount will continue to grow. Mostly we’ve focused on having team members be generalists, but scaling means that we’ll start to have people specialize more in certain tech, certain platforms, etc.

And what about your team, how big is it, and who’s part of it? 

Right now, there are 17 of us (including 2 Co-ops from Northeastern University) in Boston and Stockholm. In the Boston office, we are Kelsey, Tim, Nick, Ray, Juan, Joey, and Zain (and, me).

Interested in working together with Walter and his team? Check out the team here!