Committed to learning and continuous improvement, Kogan.com’s Engineering team develops its engineering talent through giving and taking responsibility, co-creation, mentorship, and internal mobility opportunities to grow and advance their careers. There are opportunities for Engineers at Kogan.com regardless of background. Some engineers at Kogan.com are Individual Contributors, Tech Leads or People Managers – and engineering growth paths and aspirations are supported throughout their journey. Featured here is Reuben Orange, our latest addition to the team who joined us through Kogan.com’s internal mobility program. After a highly successful 10-year journey in the Purchasing team, we were excited to support Reuben's career aspirations and his passion in all things data and software engineering.
With an Educational background in Mathematics and extensive experience across various roles within Purchasing, Reuben brings a unique skill set to his new role.
Collaborating closely with our Data Engineering and Business Intelligence squad,Reueben plays a crucial role in developing, managing, and optimizing infrastructure, tools, and processes important for meeting Kogan.com's analytics and data requirements.
Reuben's wealth of domain experience, coupled with his genuine passion for data and meticulous attention to detail, positions him as an outstanding Data Engineer member to the team. Tell us Reuben….
What initially sparked your interest in transitioning your previous role as pricing manager to data engineering? The pricing manager role was created to develop a “pricing strategy”, I called it “making sure we don't end up on an episode of Hoarders”. We needed to bring Kogan’s inventory level down from our very high post COVID levels, to a more reasonable position, while salvaging as much value as possible. Together, the whole team did that very successfully, and we now get much more value from a dollar invested into inventory than we did before. The role involved a lot of data querying, cleaning and crunching, which I enjoyed. And now as a data engineer, I can do even more of that! While also learning from the amazing DEBI (Data Engineering and Business Intelligence) team.
What were the biggest challenges you faced during your transition, and how did you overcome them? Wrestling with new tools has been a challenge, pushing, pulling, sprinting. I was comfortable living in a spreadsheet, but now I live in the belly of a python script. But I reckon the biggest challenge has been letting go of the old role. Old tasks die hard!
Can you share some specific examples of how skills from your previous role have been valuable in your new role? I am lucky in my old role I gained experience writing SQL and building dashboards, with the help from some great mentors. But a large part of the data engineering role is playing detective, you have to understand the data, and how it’s all connected, to get some value from it. So it has helped having experience as an end user of the data. For example, how are the different objects in the admin panel connected, or what do we mean when using different terms like AGPDI or Gross Sales.
How has your day-to-day work as a data engineer differed from your previous role as a pricing analyst? I would say the biggest change is the Engineering way of working, agile. Every day, we have a stand up to chat about what we’re working on, and what we’re planning to work on, and if anything is blocking us. When completing a piece of work, we always get feedback on it from the rest of the team, everybody knows a lot about what I’m working on, and could easily pick up where I left off. We also have continuous improvement baked in, with fortnightly retrospectives, where we look back at what did and didn’t work.
What advice would you give to others looking to make a similar career transition? I wouldn’t say it’s easy to get into software engineering, it's a lot of work, but I would say it’s very accessible, more so than ever. There is a rich vein of golden knowledge out there on the internet, you just have to mine it.
