Chuan-Zheng Lee
Head of Data, Kami
Chuan-Zheng Lee has been at Kami, a rapidly growing education technology company based in Auckland, since 2021. He first joined as a Senior Data Engineer, and he now leads the company’s first data team, which includes data engineers, data analysts and internal engineering support. Prior to his work at Kami, he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University, studying information theory and machine learning. He was also deeply involved in teaching while at Stanford, and has worked in the telecommunications sector.
Sessions
From Start-Up to Scale-Up: Building a Data Team at a High-Growth Global Ed-Tech Company
In four short years, Kami has grown from 8 million to over 40 million users and from 23 to over 100 employees, exporting New Zealand-made software to support teachers and students in classrooms all over the world. Such rapid growth saw Kami recognised in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2022 and as the NZ Deloitte Fast 50 Fastest Growing Company for 2021. It also came with a commensurate explosion in demand for data — not to mention in data itself, with our data warehouse growing from 4 TB to over 175 TB. In this talk, I’ll recount our journey from assorted employees to a key team of seven responsible for data and internal engineering support for the company. I’ll discuss our unique challenges as a leading NZ exporter of education technology and how we built our team, infrastructure, and operations to automate business-as-usual queries and democratise access to data. Topics I’d cover may include some from among the following: - challenges including scaling and working with the US public school system - our cloud-native stack, including ClickHouse, Kafka, DBT, Hex, Ruby on Rails and why we use these - how we automated pushing weekly product usage insights to our CRM and how our sales team relies on this - how we automated a system to provide app usage analytics to school decision-makers - how our close relationship with our software engineering team has influenced our work - how data is embedded in our organisational culture and how this has evolved as our team has grown Topics I’d cover may include some from among the following: - challenges including scaling and working with the US public school system - our cloud-native stack, including ClickHouse, Kafka, DBT, Hex, Ruby on Rails and why we use these - how we automated pushing weekly product usage insights to our CRM and how our sales team relies on this - how we automated a system to provide app usage analytics to school decision-makers - how our close relationship with our software engineering team has influenced our work - how data is embedded in our organisational culture and how this has evolved as our team has grown
Starts: 4:30 PM
Ends: 5:00 PM