Jacob Zimmerman

Data Engineer @thatgamecompany

Data Platform- Managed a 1.5TB/day data pipeline for Sky: Children of the Light, collaborating with the Game Development team to integrate event tracking across 400 events, 70 levels, 200 countries, & 6 platforms, ensuring scalability & reliability for 1 million DAU- Utilized Airflow & BigQuery extensively for orchestrating data workflows & processing large volumes of event data- Streamlined the DS/ML team’s workflow by implementing a comprehensive feature store, aggregating critical player metrics for advanced modeling & analysis- Championed the migration of transformation workflows from Airflow to Dataform (GCP\'s dbt equivalent), modernizing company practices.Real-Time Analytics Application- Served as a Data Engineer for a proprietary platform designed for real-time game analytics, supporting up to 50k concurrent players- Partnered with the Game Security & DS/ML teams to develop solutions for detecting cheaters, bots, abusers, & other harmful activities through anomaly detection & machine learning models, enhancing game integrity & player safety- Conceptualized & implemented real-time churn analysis systems to identify player drop-off points, providing actionable insights to game designers for improving player retention strategies- Led the development & implementation of a dynamic cohort feature, allowing for real-time player segmentation based on custom criteria- Conducted extensive database maintenance & monitoring using DBeaver on the Timescale database, optimizing partition sizes, applying compression, setting retention policies, & refining high-resource queries to maintain performance at scale- Utilized Spark to optimize data transformation & aggregation processes, enhancing efficiency & scalability in handling player events & ensuring timely insights into player behavior & trends- Constructed TypeScript-based API endpoints for the full-stack team to retrieve data from Timescale, enabling seamless integration with the front-end.