Meet the Team at Gousto Tech — Mhairi Grant — Business Analyst

This post is part of our series interviewing members of our GoustoTech team. In this post, we meet Mhairi who is a Business Analyst in Data Engineering.

What is your favourite food?

Tough question! Probably carbonara or anything pasta based 🍝

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gousto.

Hi I’m Mhairi! I’m a Business Analyst (BA) in data engineering (DE) at Gousto. I started in our Starfruits squad, which was focused on ingesting and modelling supply data, but now I work across all sorts of data engineering projects.

Being a BA in data engineering is a very interesting but also wide reaching job — you have to be a jack of all trades! The main objective is making sure that the work we’re doing is providing real value, whilst acting as the translator between the business and engineering teams.

It’s also a lot of making people talk to each other, or ‘facilitating conversations’ — whatever you want to call it!

How long have you been at Gousto?

I started in April of 2021, so about a year now.

Can you tell us a little about your journey before arriving at Gousto?

I studied economics at uni, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it honestly just seemed like a good catch-all. I ended up loving econ, and will still engage in any sort of game theory discussion, but it was a bit too theoretical for me to consider pursuing it full time.

So I joined a technology trading grad scheme at a bank. That’s where I learned how engineering projects are managed (or not 👀) in the real world, and got interested in data.

Prior to Gousto I was mainly working on software engineering projects in big data and analytics, but I dabbled in some data science too.

What made you decide to join Gousto?

I wanted to work somewhere where I was closer to (and more passionate about) the end product. Plus the tech stack is significantly more interesting to me than the legacy systems I was working with before!

What has been the most exciting thing you’ve worked on at Gousto since joining?

I’ve worked on a wide variety of technical projects since working at Gousto, but the most exciting (and challenging) thing was probably starting our Starfruits squad 🌟

A large concentration of requests coming into DE were to help make operational decision making more data-driven, so we spun up a specific squad to ingest and model that data. It’s not easy to start a data engineering squad from scratch, but it’s safe to say that we all learned a lot in the process.

What’s in the pipeline that you’re excited about at Gousto?

Work on sustainability initiatives! In the next few quarters we are ingesting and modelling data to help the company measure different sustainability metrics. Stay tuned to find out more 🌍

How would you describe the culture at Gousto?

When people ask me this in hiring interviews I always answer ‘surprisingly relaxed’. We’re a very ambitious team in DE, we’ve got a lot to do, and I think with all of that considered the culture is surprisingly relaxed. You’re trusted to get your work done.

Why would you suggest that someone considers joining us at Gousto Tech?

Join for the technical challenge and exposure to exciting problems, stay for the free food!