What do the career path and the day-in-the-life look like for a Data Infrastructure Engineer at Benchling?
We connected with Abhinava Singh to find out!
Interested in learning more about Benchling and their job openings? Make sure to check out their company page on VentureFizz!
Where did you grow up? What did your parents do for work?
I grew up in sunny Phoenix, AZ. My mom was a cosmetologist and ran her own salon studio and my dad was a software engineer for Seibel/Oracle. Though when I was in high school, my father left the world of software engineering to become a restaurateur which he still is today!
Where did you go to college? What did you study and what were some of your initial jobs out of school?
I went to UC Berkeley where I first studied microbiology but graduated with a major in computer science. I never really intended to get into tech until one of my postdocs in my first lab encouraged me to take an intro to computer science course to do some advanced analysis of high throughput image data. It was here where I fell in love with programming and made the switch to study computer science.
A lot of the research I did during my undergraduate years was related to the intersection of computer vision and health care. But when I looked for my first internship, I ended up joining a fintech startup called Nerdwallet where I was one of the first data scientists there. I extended my internship through my senior year, and I ended up accepting a full time offer staying at Nerdwallet for 3 years where I saw/learned the ins and outs of what it takes to build a data driven organization from the data engineering/data infrastructure to the reporting/ml model serving all the way at the end.
What has attributed to your success thus far and has helped propel you to the position you have now?
A lot of my experience prior to Benchling was being a customer of different data systems. Now that I am the one building those data systems, that experience has helped me cultivate a lot of empathy for my customers but has also given me the instinct to anticipate where they will be a few years out and build towards that. As a result, our team has ended up with data infrastructure that powers all of our reports and business decisions/processes which has been incredibly rewarding to be a part of!
Can you share the high-level responsibilities of your current position as a Data Infrastructure Engineer at Benchling?
At Benchling, data infrastructure serves multiple functions. It’s firstly used to help Benchling customers make sense of their biological data via our warehouse and insights tools. Data Infrastructure is responsible for the data pipelines that move customer data from our various benchling products to multitenant warehouses which store/serve this data to customers via SQL queries that customers write in our insights tool. Data infrastructure also is responsible for the pipelines that move all kinds of data to our internal data warehouse and reporting tools which our employees use to run the business and understand how customers are using Benchling. I initially worked on our internal data infrastructure before eventually moving to working on our customer facing data infrastructure as well.
Any tips for someone considering a career in your field?
I think the world of data infrastructure is fascinating. It’s a really cool intersection of systems, APIs, people, and traditional data work. I think the major indicator of success in data infrastructure is attention to detail and a keen eye for operating good systems. Poorly thought out decisions can become really punishing when you quickly hit high scale data. And while nobody will build the perfect solution initially, being able to spot problems quickly and constantly improve will definitely separate you from the herd in the long run! Read books about being a good SRE, read about non software-related operations/systems, take a systems design class in college, etc. Honestly, I use those ideas every single day on the job.
Day in the Life
Coffee, tea, or nothing?
Coffee. I love pour overs. It’s super therapeutic and gives me time to think about what I’m going to do that day as I wake up.
What time do you start working?
9:30am usually to do a bit of goal setting, calendar planning, and slack answering before I really get started at 10.
What are three things that motivate you in your role?
- Watching folks in the org up level their decision making with data.
- Watching others compound capabilities to do things you never imagined.
- Feature requests. It’s a great sign that you’re heading in the right direction.
Every day is different, but can you outline what a typical day looks like for you?
I usually have a standup meeting where I update the team on what I’ve been working on and any problems I am running into. I then try to get a lot of coding done in the morning before lunch. After lunch, I usually have some meetings with stakeholders on upcoming projects, planning, etc. In between, I'll often try to unblock my team via code reviews or get some more coding/doc writing done.
What time do you typically wrap up the work day?
5-6pm
Do you log back in at night or do you shut it down completely?
Shut it down completely. Unless I am on-call in which case, I can’t 😆.
Any productivity hacks?
Time boxing is huge. Instead of multiplexing between tasks constantly. Schedule a time in your calendar to work on a thing. If you don’t finish, just schedule time later! Not only does this help me focus, it also lets me be intentional about my maker (flow) time!
What are the 3 apps that you can’t live without?
Spotify, Google Maps (my restaurants/bars to visit list is vast), TikTok (it’s unhealthy at this point)
What professional accomplishment are you proudest of?
Building our internal data infrastructure! Watching it go from nothing to seeing a fleet of data scientists empower our whole company with data was such an incredible thing to see!
Who do you admire or call upon for professional advice?
My managers have always been fantastic resources for me to bounce ideas off of while also being directly helpful during any issue that came up! I also have a ton of co-workers who I call on to give me extra sets of eyes for any given problem I am working on!
Biggest guilty pleasure song and/or artist?
Clarity by Zedd
Most used Emoji:
👀(it let’s people know I’m working on their thing)
