Ever wanted to know more about the people behind your favorite Enterprise AI platform? You're in luck — every few weeks, meet one of the humans at Dataiku working every day to ensure customers and users find success on their path to Enterprise AI. This week, we spoke with Jed Dougherty, VP of Field Engineering, to help us learn more about Yannis Ghazouani, Lead Architect APAC. Yannis also accepted our challenge to answer rapid-fire questions about all things Dataiku, so be sure to check out the video below!
What is Yannis’s role about?
Yannis leads the field engineering team in APAC. He joined us after spending four years on our data science team in Europe and he is now managing two technical support engineers as well as a DataOps architect. He is in charge of all things architecture and support in the region, making sure we provide our customers with the technical help they need to best implement and use our platform.
What does he bring to your team?
Like me, Yannis came to field engineering from the data science team. This gives him a really strong background in the way customers actually use Dataiku, which is knowledge he uses when helping with their architecture. His flexibility also helps us a lot. Although he works on the other side of the world —he moved from Paris to Sydney a year ago — he is always flexible and accommodating with making meetings (sometimes even from the beach!).
You manage a distributed team with people based in the U.S., EMEA and APAC. How do you stay in touch?
We have a biweekly hour-long meeting in my evening/his morning. We cover all different things there. Like all field engineers, Yannis also contributes to the field engineering wiki, which gives the team a global, centralized place to share knowledge. I also try to provide Yannis with technical and professional advice whenever I can.
According to you, which Dataiku value (or aspect of the culture) does Yannis represent the most?
I generally appreciate his dedication. He cares a lot about our customers and I have seen this numerous times and especially on his management of one of our major Australian accounts. I think Yannis is also endlessly adaptable. This is a key Dataiku value, especially on the field engineering team. We’re all about adapting Dataiku to real-world constraints, and Yannis exemplifies this capability.