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Analytics at Netflix - Who We Are and What We Do - Netflix TechBlog
Analytics at Netflix - Who We Are and What We Do - Netflix TechBlog
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An Introduction to Analytics and Visualization Engineering at Netflix
Across nearly every industry, there is recognition that data analytics is key to driving
informed business decision-making. But there is far less agreement on what that term
“data analytics” actually means — or what to call the people responsible for the work.
Even within Netflix, we have many groups that do some form of data analysis,
including business strategy and consumer insights. But here we are talking about
Netflix’s Data Science and Engineering group, which specializes in analytics at scale.
The group has technical, engineering-oriented roles that fall under two broad category
titles: “Analytics Engineers” and “Visualization Engineers.” In this post, we refer to these
two titles collectively as the “analytics role.” These professionals come from a wide
range of backgrounds and bring different skills to their work, while sharing a common
drive to generate and scale business impact through data.
A couple other defining characteristics of the role are full ownership of the problem (in
Netflix lingo, you are the “informed captain” of your space) and creating trustworthy
outputs. These are only possible through the one-two punch of deep business context
👊 and technical excellence 👊. Full ownership often means building new data
pipelines, navigating complex schemas and large data sets, developing or improving
metrics for business performance, and creating intuitive visualizations and dashboards
— always with an eye towards actionable insights.
The Engineer enjoys making data available by piping it in from new sources in
optimal ways, building robust data models, prototyping systems, and doing
project-specific engineering. They’re still analysts at heart but, similar to data
engineers, they have a deep understanding of data warehouse capabilities and are
pros at data processing optimization and performance tuning. Being at this
intersection of disciplines allows them to produce full-stack outputs, layering
visualizations and analytics on their projects.
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