Mike Alfare

Data Engineer, Kaleo I've held several positions in my career that all center around the use of data to drive decisions. As my career progresses, I am moving more and more towards the technical side of the data stack. I started in Actuarial, doing reserving and pricing analyses. This taught me about the business and the nuance between what the data appears to say and what is actually happening on the front lines. I then moved into BI development, where I focused on producing quality datasets and visualizations for our customers to make business strategy decisions. Here I employed some techniques that were later used by our data warehouse team. I got back to my mathematics roots when I became Markel's first Principal Data Scientist. I performed various portfolio analyses to identify factors driving loss in several of our niche products. My data science work earned me the opportunity to be the Product Manager for our new data lake. I built the lake out to support additional use cases and it is now the primary source for data at Markel. My last move landed me back behind the keyboard as our Principal Data Engineer. I determined that I enjoyed building the product more than designing it. I'm building out our department's DevOps / Cloud practice and providing utilities and resources to support developers across all teams. I'm also enjoy applying my teaching and mentoring skills as I become more senior among my peers. I co-lead Markel's Python User Group where I'm focusing on providing training resources and support for those new to the language. I also just took on a leadership role with PyRVA, the Richmond Python User Group. There I'll be focusing on building a framework for aligning skill-based volunteers with non-profits to build a shared data infrastructure. In the past, I owned and operated a tutoring business for five years. I built that business through a combination of networking and online marketing. My reputation as an approachable and adaptive educational advisor spread through my client base. I was known for being able to instruct students at any level and across several topics, including those in which I was never formally trained. This is a skill that I continue to hone in my current role as a mentor to more junior associates. Specialties: Data Engineering, Software Design/Integration, DevOps, Collaboration, Mentoring, Python, SQL