Apache Spark Committer Reynold Xin helps Fellows

This June we launched the Insight Data Engineering Fellows Program, designed to help experienced engineers transition to careers in big data. During the free, six week, full-time program, Insight Data Engineering Fellows work with technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, Storm, Spark, and others to build robust, scalable data pipelines while meeting data engineers from top technology companies, and interviewing with them immediately following the program.

Insight Data Engineering Fellows from our inaugural session now work as data engineers at various mentor companies including Apple, Yelp, Intuit, Microsoft and various startups such as Silicon Valley Data Science and Zillabyte. At Insight, the Fellows built big data applications, including a real estate data API and a data product for restaurant recommendations along an arbitrary driving route.

Additionally, Nathan Marz, creator of Storm and author of the upcoming book Big Data, has joined Insight as an advisor and active mentor. Nathan has been working with the Insight Fellows on a regular basis, running workshops on Storm, Lambda Architecture and Clojure, in addition to giving project feedback. We’re extremely excited to have him involved. We have also hosted a number of very successful workshops as part of the program. Reynold Xin and Paco Nathan from Databricks have been in to show off Spark, Pato Echague from RelateIQ shared his experience from the Cassandra community, and Sujee Maniyam from Elephant Scale, and author of Hadoop Illuminated, consistently works with the Fellows sharing his experience the Hadoop ecosystems and building ETL pipelines.

Our second session of the Insight Data Engineering is now in progress and is shaping up to be even more successful than the first, thanks to our mentors and the active participation of our new alumni. Insight Data Engineering Fellows in this session are experienced engineers, both hardware and software, joining us from leading companies, consulting firms and universities. They’re leveraging the experience of the alumni in the first session, and creating some incredible projects while meeting with more than two dozen mentor companies we have actively involved this session, including: Facebook, Square, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Jawbone, LinkedIn, Intuit, Airbnb, and many others.

The next session of the Insight Data Engineering Fellows Program starts January 2015 in Silicon Valley. Engineers, computer scientists, and anyone with a strong background in programming (no PhD required) are welcome to apply. Applications are open until Monday, October 27. We can’t wait to build the next generation of big data applications and pipelines with future Insight Data Engineering Fellows!