About

I’m Zohaib (or Zo for short). I work independently now on a handful of experiments aimed at the next generation of data platforms. The first is close to its MVP reveal and I started this site to write about the day-to-day of building it and the adjacent work: what works, what breaks, and where they're headed.

Zohaib Syed

Most of my work sits at the intersection of data platforms, agentic AI, and analytics engineering. Lately I’ve been experimenting with systems that independently explore and investigate data, improving their own capabilities through repetition.

My career started in the late-2010s data science boom. Around that time I graduated with a degree where my focus was in proof-based math. I spent the next several years building large-scale data infrastructure. It started at a small fleet analytics shop and then I consulted for orgs across big tech through a Big 4’s AI and Data Engineering practice that I’m still recovering from. Most recently I tech-led a pod of the firm’s data engineers on a privacy program for a large social media family of apps you likely use daily.

I’ve worked across several domains including telematics (vehicular IoT), privacy, marketing analytics, trust and safety, and financial services. Across them I’ve built several hundred pipelines, including a couple dozen operating at Pb scale. Many of them were routine ETL and ELT. Others were more exotic, like embedding agentic processing into dataflows, unnesting variable-length parent-child chains through dozens of iterated self-joins, prototyping the supply and demand models behind how a data warehouse charges and allocates compute, and even setting up a process to patch IoT firmware through the same scheduler we built our pipelines with.

I’m currently based out of the greater Minneapolis and Chicago areas.

Always happy to talk shop. You can reach me by email or on LinkedIn.