#166 Optimizing Cloud Data Warehouses with Salim Syed, VP, Head of Engineering at Capital One Software

Effective data management has become a cornerstone of success in our digital era. It involves not just collecting and storing information but also organizing, securing, and leveraging data to drive progress and innovation. Many organizations turn to tools like Snowflake for advanced data warehousing capabilities. However, while Snowflake enhances data storage and access, it's not a complete solution for all data management challenges. To address this, tools like Capital One’s Slingshot can be used alongside Snowflake, helping to optimize costs and refine data management strategies.

Salim Syed is a VP, Head of engineering for Capital One Slingshot product. He led Capital One’s data warehouse migration to AWS and is a specialist in deploying Snowflake to a large enterprise. Salim’s expertise lies in developing Big Data (Lake) and Data Warehouse strategy on the public cloud. He leads an organization of more than 100 data engineers, support engineers, DBAs and full stack developers in driving enterprise data lake, data warehouse, data management and visualization platform services.

Salim has more than 25 years of experience in the data ecosystem. His career started in data engineering where he built data pipelines and then moved into maintenance and administration of large database servers using multi-tier replication architecture in various remote locations. He then worked at CodeRye as a database architect and at 3M Health Information Systems as an enterprise data architect. Salim has been at Capital One for the past six years.

In this episode, Adel and Salim explore cloud data management and the evolution of Slingshot into a major multi-tenant SaaS platform, the shift from on-premise to cloud-based data governance, the role of centralized tooling, strategies for effective cloud data management, including data governance, cost optimization, and waste reduction as well as insights into navigating the complexities of data infrastructure, security, and scalability in the modern digital era.

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Capital One Slingshot
• Snowflake
• Course: Introduction to Data Warehousing
• Course: Introduction to Snowflake