Analytics and Arepas
Carefully prepared using many specialized tools and elements, then presented with varying accompaniments to fit the consumer’s needs and bring them delight. This certainly describes analytics, but to the surprise of many, also fits arepas: a type of food pockets made of ground maize dough originating from South America. Perhaps that’s why the Analytics Platform team at Lever is dubbed Team Arepa.
Yummy food aside, Team Arepa is composed of creative problem solvers from different backgrounds, identities, and experiences, all bringing a diverse set of skills to expand our analytics product suite in order to position Lever as a leader in the Talent space.
My favorite two things about being on Team Arepa are the opportunity to grow into a new technical discipline: dimensional modeling, data warehousing, E(T)L(T) pipelines and the significant investment and support from Lever to do things right from a technology perspective, and the responsibility that comes with that.
Favorite Arepa Style: Classic Colombian arepa, with cheese (manchego, quesa fresca, or moz) in the dough, topped (not sliced) with a mix of shredded pork, avocado, tomato, onion, etc.
- Leighton Wallace, Senior Engineering Manger, Team Arepa
How We’re Improving Analytics at Lever
The purpose of analytics at Lever is to enable data-driven recruiting — to ensure the right people have access to the right data so that they can effectively measure and understand their performance. The original analytics solution at Lever came in the form of In-App Reports. This solution worked great for a while, however it lacked the full-extent of customizability that some of our customers desired. The solution to this was to build Lever Talent Intelligence, a new reporting pipeline powered by Tableau and our in-house Talent Analytics Consultants. This solved our customers’ frustrations with In-App Reports, but at the cost of scalability and taking them out-of-app. However, Team Arepa has been working to bring a robust, scalable solution back to the in-app experience, part of which we accomplished last year with the preview of Visual Insights.
The most memorable impact while on the reporting team was the initial launch of Visual Insights. It was one of the first projects that I worked on as a product manager at Lever and it was really exciting to dive into this evolving area of analytics. One thing that I love about this team is that we’re always striving to iterate and improve on our work. We’re in the process of doing a major overhaul and it’s really satisfying to see our initial project progress and get upgraded.
Favorite Arepa Style: Arepas de choclo
- Jason Chu, Product Manger, Team Arepa
What We’ve Been Working On
Data Warehouse Sync
Data Warehouse Sync enables customers to attain access to a complete copy of their raw Lever data. This is a powerful and robust option to access and analyze all of their data and be able to use it in whichever way that works best for them, such as business intelligence tools, self-hosted data warehouses, and other reporting infrastructure. Prior to this project, customers would have to rely on the partial data offered via Lever’s Data API to achieve similar results, with the main downside being that they would have to own complex data extraction and re-hydration to create a data mart suitable for their reporting needs.
From a technical standpoint, this project’s goal was to create or load secure and complete copies of customer data, which would then be accessible to them via a standard interface for query or download. It involved leveraging our existing reporting pipeline infrastructure, creating new workflows via AWS services such as Glue and Athena, and incorporating administration into our set of internal tools as well as settings in-app.
For more information on Data Warehouse Sync, please click here.
ETL Ingestor
The ETL Ingestor is an engineering championed internal project to create a new service for our Analytics pipelines that aggregates events that trigger idempotent processes, such as transformations, reprocessing, and additions. This greatly reduces the risk of overloading the sink processors and storage engines while enabling a self-healing life cycle.
Being able to specify, plan, coordinate the infrastructure rollout, and realize its effect on the health of our reporting pipelines was a very rewarding process as an engineer. It proved to be a great opportunity to develop experience with Kafka and become advocates for it here on Lever’s Engineering Team.
Furthermore, gathering and visualizing metrics, such as rate of successful/failed data ingestions at a document/row level and how quickly the service was self-healing, was very rewarding since we were able to see an immediate impact on our reporting pipelines as a whole.
Favorite Arepa Style: Arepas con carne mechada
- Shaughn Finnerty, Technical Lead, Team Arepa
Visual Insights
The Visual Insights project encompasses a complete overhaul of our in-app Analytics Dashboard offerings, replacing our homegrown reporting with Looker, a commercially available business intelligence tool. This not only accelerates our ability to build or update reports to answer the ever evolving needs of our customers, but streamlines capabilities that have been common customer asks for a long time.
This project spans both frontend and backend work across various existing Lever services as well as inspiring new services to be created, and was only made possible due to previous projects surrounding our analytics pipelines and a new role of business intelligence developers onto the team, where they handle manipulating large, disparate datasets to build the aforementioned dashboards and help companies hire great talent.
For more information on Visual Insights, please click here.
We’re hiring!
If this post resonated with you, you’ve Googled arepa recipes and/or local arepa restaurants in your area, and want to learn more about the team, please take a look at our openings to explore opportunities with us and share your story! The team has product management oriented roles as well as technical, development focused roles.
