Oras Al-Kubaisi

Mid-February ON Data Staffing was retained by a Boutique Data & AI Consultancy, to help grow their Data & ML Engineering team with Databricks-experienced hires. In just under 10 weeks, we managed to help find 5 key permanent hires, which works out one hire a fortnight. How so quickly? We focused on 3 things that the client & potential candidates should align on. Culture Cultural fit in any Data-driven SMB is key, therefore knowing a client's & a potential candidate's approach to teamwork, communication style, and work ethic is vital. Beliefs Understanding both client and candidate beliefs can provide insights into whether motivations and approaches to work align. Values It's so important that when hiring or joining a new organization people's values align from the offset, it fosters a sense of shared purpose and commitment. It goes without saying that technical ability on a profile is what gets noticed initially by a Data Headhunter, but if any of the above is not aligned then it proves no service to a client looking to hire or a candidate looking for their next move. Hours are put into speaking with stakeholders of an organization, observing and learning what their beliefs, values, and culture are REALLY like. Hours are put into shortlisting and this is where we at ON Data Staffing dive deeper into the culture, beliefs, and values of the candidate too. After that, the match-making process begins. #DataRecruitment #DataHeadhunter #BigData #DataAnalytics #DataEngineering #Databricks #Snowflake #DataConsulting

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Interesting stats from the team at Juicebox (YC S22) 📊 This is a data deep-dive for July: which technical skills were most commonly searched via the platform? 𝐓𝐎𝐓𝐏🔥📈 - Python - React - AWS Significantly, Python is searched three times more often than Node.js, which ranks fifth in search frequency. Interestingly, AWS is the only cloud provider to feature in the top 10, while GCP and Azure are ranked 18th and 26th, respectively. Machine learning and AI are also frequently searched, with both appearing in the top 15. However, I expected them to rank higher in the searches based on recent hiring trends.

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3 technical hires totalling £235,000 in salaries in 2.5 months. Here’s the breakdown: The Head of Talent Acquisition at this fintech needed top-tier tech talent, but was stretched thin.... What happened next? - They secured 3 hires across Software Engineering & QA 🤝 - The average time to hire was just 5 weeks ⏰ - They achieved a cost-saving of £15,000 compared to recruitment agencies 💰 What went down? → Before their collaboration with Move, Divido’s team was swamped and needed external expertise. → They sought an innovative, adaptable, fintech-immersed hiring partner. Once we shook hands, our strategy was set into motion: → Our seasoned tech talent partner collected requirements and outlined processes → We refined role-specific value propositions → We arrived equipped with our talent intelligence tools → We analysed the market landscape and rolled out a sourcing campaigns Thanks to this collaboration, Divido managed to onboard the exceptional talent they were after and saved a whopping £15k. The case study link is in the comments below ⬇️

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💡Advertising your Senior DevOps/SRE role online is not the most effective starting point in your recruitment process💡 I spoke to 7 Engineering managers last week who said that it was taking over 6 months to fill their senior level DevOps & SRE roles🤯 All of them had advertised their positions online as a first port of call and therefore expected a healthy flow of suitable applicants to be available within a few working days👀 Some were not even allowed to do anything else until the advert had been live for 2 weeks!😓 Last week I highlighted the issues of the current high volume of applications organisations are receiving🛑 For such business critical & specific requirement roles, this approach impacts: Candidate experience, due to lack of feedback😊😕 Time lost going through volume applications⌚ The ability to really communicate what the role is📌 Opportunity to spend on other recruitment activities🤔💭 Talent teams already stacked workload🥵 Ability to engage with the target market😕 Instead, before posting your business critical SRE/DevOps role, consider: Leveraging your own network first📞🙂 Reengage with candidates previously interviewed that performed well🤝 Allow talent teams or suppliers to actively headhunt first🎯 Work out how many people within the market have the skills you require to see if advertising will even be useful🗺️ Give these activities enough time to produce results⌚ Senior level DevOps & SRE roles will not apply to a wide variety of the market given the specific skills and unique experience each organisation requires📃 Therefore, before limiting your approach and risking company reputation, organisations need to prioritise other methods to tap into their target profiles📈 The right person for the position may never see the advert; it is crucial to go to the market and not wait for it to come to you😎 #devops #sre #seniorhires #tethr #cloud

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The Manchester Databricks meet up will be Thursday 15th August. We have an awesome line up which I'll announce soon 👁️👁️ Check out a quick video from June's meet up below. If you'd like to sign up to the Manchester Databricks user group, please see link in comments #databricks #meetup #networking

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SoftBank Group Corp. has announced its acquisition of Graphcore, a leading British AI chipmaker. Graphcore’s key offering is a range of “Intelligence Processing Units” – accelerators designed specifically for AI workloads – along with a software stack that allows developers to utilise its hardware effectively. The acquisition of Graphcore by SoftBank is likely to provide the AI chipmaker with significant resources and opportunities for expansion. It also reflects the increasing competition in the AI chip market, where companies like NVIDIA, Intel Corporation, and AMD have been vying for dominance. "In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology." Good news for the UK company, watch this space! #technews #AI #artificialintelligence #technology #business #uk Hurlingham Smith https://lnkd.in/eDszQwuP

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Speed up semantic search performance with token pruning for our ELSER model: https://lnkd.in/eXD6rHU7 #ElasticSearchLabs #SemanticSearch

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Software, DevOps & Platform Engineers you are selling yourselves short🗣️ I have received roughly 40 resumes this week since offering to give advice and feedback. I learnt a lot during this process, especially when people are applying for positions more than ever, and the need to stand out is crucial. My biggest observation was that it took me too long to understand the following⬇️ What are your specialisms? Where have you made or had an impact in your role? Which key technologies have you been using regularly? What do you want to be seen as? ➡️This is a biggie What soft skills do you have? Too may resumes make it difficult for the reader to actually understand what you are doing and what you are good at. Make it easy for people to see HOW YOU CAN ADD VALUE Drop me a message if you want some feedback on your resume📩 I will come back to you as quickly as possible.

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Dive into this blog to learn how to develop a custom GPT. It’s your own version of ChatGPT that retrieves custom data from Elasticsearch, which can add both current and proprietary context: https://gag.gl/QwcvRg #ElasticSearchLabs #GPT #Elasticsearch

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Machine Learning Engineer - Founding Team - London £200k If you answer yes to 4/5 of these questions, then you want to check out this job (link in comments) 1️⃣ Do you have experience with quantization techniques (e.g., PEFT, DeepSpeed, TensorRT) to optimize ML models? 2️⃣  Have you ever managed or worked with a multi-node HPC cluster? 3️⃣ Are you familiar with Deep Learning using PyTorch Library? 4️⃣ Do you have experience with Kubernetes container orchestration? 5️⃣  Have you worked with some of the recent Large Language Models (e.g., OpenAI, LLaMA)? #LLM #ArtificialIntelligence #Quantization

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🎙️Coming soon… Extremely excited to be launching the first series of an exclusive Podcast specifically for the Cloud, DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering community☁️🚀 I have some FANTASTIC guests lined up from Germany’s leading tech organisations👩‍💻🧑‍💻 We will be talking all things DevOps, Platform Engineering & the Cloud, from the perspective of those leading and engineering the projects🔨🔧 As well as the real life challenges Engineering teams are facing on a daily basis, and how to overcome them💥💪 If you are interested in how some of the best in the business approach their day to day, and want to gain insights and learn from their experiences then this is not to be missed😎🎤 #cloud #podcast #germany #tethr

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Day 1 of London’s CTO Craft Con. Traditionaly for such events, lots of things to think about. Unconventionally though too high density of people whom we consider to be our ICP. Why so? Resourcing model of tech talent, especially remote one, unless designed to be managed by us as the vendor, may only work upon technical management existence on the client’s end. What questions I had joy of attending today? - how much difference may one expect in setups of “local remote teams” vs “global remote teams”? - what are the key gains one may get from our services? - what businesses will fail using nearshoring models and why I can forecast these failures even before the collaboration starts? - how much value we might add to the known-value-to-be local recruitment services? - why EOR platforms are good for our model sales while some think we “compete”? I wish I had a stage to answer these and few others. Maybe tomorrow will get one! ;)

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So, the clock is ticking on AI Act compliance! 🕒 By August 2nd 2026, tech firms in the EU will need to adhere to fresh regulations concerning copyright and transparency, along with specific uses like predictive policing Actually, it’s interesting because initial deadlines are looming as early as early 2025 This rather sweeping piece of legislation really aims to protect citizens' rights by banning some AI applications while mandating more or less stringent transparency requirements In other words (and I guess this is pretty significant) companies have a limited window of time to make adjustments if they want to avoid quite hefty penalties and remain competitive

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⁉️Are DevOps teams being noticed and recognised fairly within organisations⁉️ A number of DevOps Engineers & Managers explained to me that sometimes being a DevOps Engineer can be a thankless task😓 When you perform well, everything is ticking along perfectly and nobody notices😶‍🌫️ However when things go wrong, the DevOps team are the first to come under fire and receive criticism🤬 A bit like an analogy I saw that describes a DevOps team as the screen writers, video editors and camera crew behind the scenes producing a movie🎥 Without them there would be no film, but very few actually acknowledge their work unless it goes wrong😕 The psychological safety, motivation and happiness of DevOps teams is directly impacted by this issue, and organisations must ensure that they are addressing it immediately⚠️ DevOps Engineers are crucial to any organisation that they are a part of, and if your business does not treat them fairly and give appropriate recognition they will move to somewhere that does👋 If there is anyone in the DevOps space that currently feels this way or has observed this before, and would like to speak please feel free to message me directly on here. #devops #recognition #teams #psychologicalsafety

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Hey all you amazing engineers - Check this out ⬇️⬇️⬇️ In a surprising twist, Jellyfish’s latest engineering management report has revealed some eye-opening trends in our tech world. A whopping 90% of engineers—from code wizards to DevOps believe their teams are key players in shaping business strategy. Yet, a staggering 66% of them have faced burnout in the past year. Talk about running on empty! 📉 But that's not all. Despite the recent waves of layoffs in tech, 60% of engineering managers and executives are waving red flags over a talent drought. They’re finding it tougher than ever to scoop up the qualified candidates they need. It seems like even the brightest minds need a bit of a recharge these days. 🌟💻 Check out the full scoop here! Jellyfish ThinkBIG https://lnkd.in/emrRBhDy

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This is another example of the exceptional quality of content our #partners at ClimbUK #Climb24 are delivering this year. VeUP have an exceptional team who really know how to get the most out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and can help your #businesses fly. One thing we talk about a lot at Investor Ladder and CRSI is #funding a business. Many people focus on external finance - e.g. #equity or #debt. But actually one of the most important things to look at when growing and scaling a business is #cashflow. As well as amazing service offerings, VeUP have a great payment terms, the likes of which I haven't seen before for AWS. The proposition is so good, many of our clients have asked us "What is the catch?" There is no catch, it is simply that the team at VeUP understand the needs of early-stage, high-growth and #scaling businesses. Check them out at Climb24 - www.climb24.co.uk UBS British Business Bank Innovate UK Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Innovate UK Business Connect Department for Business and Trade EHE Ventures Mishcon de Reya LLP West Yorkshire Combined Authority Squire Patton Boggs South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority TECH SY Nexus Leeds Yorkshire Asian Business Association Innovation SuperNetwork Creative UK Partners&. Tech Climbers Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture Propel Teams Fourth Day PR & Content Leeds Digital The New Monday Tech North Advocates Bionow Lloyds Banking Group Plexal GreenTech Gathering Digital Sport North SPIKE DIGITAL Bobble AI Department for Culture, Media and Sport Leeds City Council Barclays Eagle Labs

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💥 April has started with an absolute BANG! 💥 Three placements locked in already and over the last 10 days we've had 25 interviews happen... Would love to chat with any of the following: - Senior Software Engineer (Golang, AWS focus) - US BASED only. - Fully Homomorphic Encryption Cryptographers - Europe. - GPU Optimisation Engineers - Europe. - Senior Backend Engineers (Python, Go or Rust) - building an infrastructure protocol from zero - Remote. - Senior Rust Engineers. - Senior BD profiles with web3 experience. - Head of Marketing with web3 experience. If any of these could be of interest and want to find out more, drop me a DM and I'll be happy to chat further! #recruitment #web3 #crypto #blockchain #ai #fhe #hiring

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The payment gateway Stripe migrated 1.5 PB of data into new shards. They used the following algorithm. 1. Mark data to be migrated 2. Bulk export data into new shards 3. Simultaneously, copy live data into new shards (async events) 4. Check data for correctness 5. Make clients point to new shards 6. Remove migrated data Article link: https://lnkd.in/dGt_DGiD Migrating data from one place to another is a common use case (most cloud providers offer solutions around this). I've created a set of videos on this topic. 1. Database replication: https://lnkd.in/deahS5Qi 2. Write ahead logs and change data capture: https://lnkd.in/d9c_fmhg 3. Write amplification and split-brain: https://lnkd.in/d2W5qaB6 Have a great day! #SystemDesign #DatabaseMigration

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