Muness Castle

Data Engineer • Data Analyst • Columbus, OH, US

Software Architecture

Data Analysis

SQL

Available for hire fromNegotiable

Contracts

Full-Time Roles

Engineering & Analytics leader achieving worthy goals through vision, strategy, ownership, and calm intensity

Hi 👋 I am Muness, a technology executive with over 20 years of experience in technology organizations. I specialize in data engineering, strategy, management, organizational design, and software architecture. My mission is to 10x how well you use your data to achieve worthy goals. I do this through clear vision, compelling strategy, extreme ownership, and calm intensity. I believe in the power of data to inform decisions and drive strategy.

Projects

Shopify Admin & Mobile Core Product Analytics

• Developed metrics that showed impact over time for medium and large merchants. This addressed board desire to understand the growth, back office and mobile initiatives impact. • Redirected Shopify Mobile development towards companion usage, leveraging data insights and narratives. • Boosted Home feed, Merchant Guides, and Alerts feeds engagement by collaborating with teams to optimize or remove low-performing content, increasing Alerts engagement from 10% to 24% in Q1 2023. See More

Shopify Developer Platform Analytics

• Revamped KPIs to prioritize PII exposure, performance, and compliance, establishing the Built for Shopify program to improve app quality and reward developers. • Identified app performance improvement opportunities in specific REST endpoints and GraphQL fields by processing complex performance logs. • Developed self-service insights tool for developer funnels, enabling customizable funnel analysis and leading to roadmap changes addressing developer segment blockers. • Promoted Shopify Functions and Shopify Flow by quantifying unique merchant use cases offered by apps. See More

Shopify Infrastructure Data Science

• Automated and refined resource-specific forecasts, resulting in lower target budgets and improved GCP negotiations. • Mapped GCP spend per resource to services and teams, enabling quick identification and mitigation of spend changes. • Optimized merchant/database assignment, reducing error rates and costs. • Overhauled Storefront performance metrics, ETL, and instrumentation, enabling impact measurement and focus on architecture improvements, such as prioritizing render times over region expansion. See More

Zapier Head of Data Platform

Scaled data through cross-functional, domain-focused Insights pods: • Implemented Data Mesh approach for data warehouse models and strategic insights/recommendations. • Developed department strategies and goals informed by data-derived insights and experiments. • Covered various business units: Customer Support, Zapier Workflow product, Marketing, Partnerships, Engineering and Growth, Revenue and Engineering Operations • Grew centralized data platform department with teams for ingest/storage/compute infrastructure, user/financials data assets, data governance, recommender systems, experimentation, ETL and reverse ETL tooling. • Enabled dozens of simultaneous experiments for tens of thousands of users across website, application, email. • Provided framework for ingesting data from SaaS applications using configuration/custom Python code. • Ingested data from dozens of third-party systems, databases, and billions of events daily. • Achieved 1.7x increase in Open-to-Clickthrough rate with workflow recommender system. • Utilized forecast model to predict ARR subscription and metered billing. See More

Zapier Head of Production Engineering

Defined and executed our "you build it, you run it" strategy: • Empowered teams by splitting services into separate AWS accounts, providing documentation/training materials, meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs). • Partnered with teams by embedding SREs, identifying hosted solutions for faster scaling/higher reliability, providing infrastructure design reviews, developing runbooks/incident response processes/escalation backup. See More

Zapier Head of Data (taking Data from 2 to 20)

Grew the data organization from 2 data scientists to a cross-functional team of 20: • Hired, managed, and coached Data engineers, warehouse engineers, data scientists and data analysts. • Delivered quantitative insights to product and operations teams facilitating decision making. • During my tenure we built out a data warehouse and BI platform that facilitates self-service of product, marketing, revenue and financial analysis. • Provided funnel analysis, conversion rates, daily financial metrics including ARR per account, recognized revenue to name a few high visibility ones. • Built out a data lake with relational and event data from all transactional and operational systems in-house and SaaS. • Hands-on in developing financial metrics, MAU and other product usage, survival rate analysis, ETL, Kimball Dimensional modeling. See More

Work History

Director of Data Science

ShopifySep 2021 - Present • 3 yrs 1 moSuccessfully transitioned multiple data teams from a support function to strategic partners, contributing to the scaling of the organization with increased impact and visibility. Established a reputation as a trustworthy partner, sought after for feedback, ideas, and support.

Head of Data, Director of Data Platform

ZapierMar 2017 - Sep 2021 • 4 yrs 7 mosBuilt the data org at Zapier. Spearheaded the development of a culture centered on data-informed decision-making. Pioneered a platform enabling Analytics Engineers and Data Scientists to independently deliver valuable insights while building a future-proof data infrastructure.

Education

Franklin University

MS, Computer Science2004

How Pangea Works

Effortlessly discover top talent

We’ve distilled the candidate search from endless hours down to just a few minutes. Using Pangea’s AI-powered search tools, you can find top fractional talent able to take on your next project. Our system looks at your company’s niche and your needs to find the perfect match faster than any traditional hiring platform.

Start working with talent today

The top talent on Pangea is ready to get started with you right now. You can message or hire a candidate right from their profile page and start assigning work as soon as they respond. And the best part? Pangea’s fractional contract structure lets you start small and ramp up as your needs change, keeping your costs manageable and your team’s capabliities flexible.

Track work and invoices in one place

Assign tasks, track progress, and complete invoices all on Pangea. We’ve combined every part of the hiring process into one platform to eliminate the miscommunication that’s unavoidable on other freelance platforms. We even send out 1099s to your contractors at the end of the year!

Talk with a Talent Expert

Members of our team are available to help you speed through the hiring process.

Available Now

Book a Call