Altin's Babylon Career Journey

What Babylon team are you part of?

The Babylon Insights team

What drew you to BI and Analytics?

I have always been intrigued by how much data there is out there and how visualisations can help with storytelling behind it. For me it all started with my Bachelor of Science final project (some 15 years ago), consisting of a Java application to visualize protein binding by parsing data from the web. I found the process of data gathering and presenting quite powerful, and have used this approach to build an online business visualisation I created at the time. To complete my understanding, a few years back I enrolled in a Master of Science (MSc) course specifically focusing on data analytics, that paved the way to become an insight analyst. Absolutely love my professional choices.

What drew you to Babylon?

Babylon’s mission is very inspiring and powerful, but aside from that I joined as I was finishing my MSc dissertation and Babylon struck me as a progressive company with focus on new technologies. During the interview process, I was impressed by the quality, knowledge and professionalism of my next-to-be peers and I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. Soon approaching 5 years as a Babylonian, I can just say what an amazing and fulfilling journey it has been. I’ve seen firsthand how Babylon had grown in terms of headcount, expansion in different regions and lastly becoming a public company.

What do you enjoy about your role?

I do enjoy the technical challenges my role presents. Creating Tableau visualizations that are not only aesthetically appealing, but taking care of functionality and user journey is something I enjoy doing. The challenges the business faces in relation to data accessibility both from legal and technical aspects, makes the job interesting and challenging. As my role is in conjunction with the other team members, helping each other and knowledge sharing is commonplace. Summarizing my role, I can say I love it as I’m part of an amazing team, a business with great mission and a role with technical challenges.

What skills did it take to get here?

As with any analytics role, understanding of data structures and how to extract data is very imperative, but also presenting (in the form of reports and dashboards) is quite important too. My MSc in Data Science and Analytics helped me to understand the theoretical and some practical aspects of the role, for example interrogating the database/data-warehouse with sql queries. As part of this, having the mindset to investigate and debug issues should be second nature. Knowing how to implement best practices on data visualization and knowledge of tools like Tableau is really key in order to explain the data in a clear and understandable way to stakeholders. This has come with practice through my practical roles since my MSc. Last but not least, stakeholder management and keeping up with user expectations is very important and part of the job. The good part is that there exists a vast knowledge-base within the team, and there are also learning opportunities and sessions related to tools (such as Tableau) to help everyone upskill. For specific queries, I have found that everyone within the team is always willing to find time to help.

What’s the most difficult project you’ve done at Babylon?

I’m spoiled here, but yes I can pick a project we delivered in my early days as a team member of the Babylon Business Insights team. We did a campaign in conjunction with a leading newspaper, that visualizes the aggregated habits of Londoners distributed by borough. As this was to be published on the leading newspaper’s website, we had to make sure our insight was accurate and fully representative of reality. After a few meetings, discussions and iterations, we were confident we had collected correct aggregated statistics and provided the right visualizations to be published. It was interesting to see and hear everyone at Babylon discussing their respective borough information the next day.