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Spotlight on Engineering: Erum

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Erum, you’re a Data Scientist at Postman. What would you say … you do here?

Well, I play around with data. I try my best to help Postman make decisions from data that each team captures so religiously.

Almost every day you would find me either trying to fetch data to try to answer the what and why’s of events happening in the app, bugging different teams for more data and pointing out any improvements, trying to create and verify hypotheses, creating colorful charts displaying patterns, trends and relationships making my best effort to get across our discoveries from analysis.

Personally, this last part is the most challenging part. My analysis is as good as I am able to communicate it…

You’ve worked in the Postman Bangalore office for a little over 1 year now. How did you get started working at Postman?

I have been analysing data  for the last 5 years, of which most of my experience had been around consulting services (banking, finance, adtech…). Most of these projects are tenured which would limit you from spending more time with the company, product and issues around them so as to understand them deeper.

Most clients were big service companies, so the tech they would use is something that has been used for years and less difficult to replace/evolve. The tasks became repetitive and less challenging after awhile.

For me, Postman became the solution to these problems. At Postman, I can think and experiment about the short & long term questions and answers important to the company with as much freedom as I would have in my  own company with the most advanced and efficient tools and technology.

What tech do you get to work with?

The data science team at Postman works with a range of tools and platforms. For data warehousing, we use redshift, Neo4j graph platform is used for network analysis activities, Anaconda (Python distribution) for data analysis, AWS Lambda (for script scheduling). Lastly, we use Microsoft PowerBI for reporting and visualization.

What’s something cool you’ve worked on recently?

A very exciting task we are trying to accomplish right now is to identify networks of connected users in Postman’s user base.

Once we do this, we’ll be able to expand our perspective of users in the Postman universe  from that of an individual user to looking at user(s) as part of a larger group that is using Postman to achieve their business goals. Our team is really hopeful about this.

What is one thing everyone should know about the Postman app?

Lots of people out there think Postman is an API testing tool, but in reality, it is a platform where I can build and run my own applications.

What is something we don’t know about you?

When it comes to my social life, I am a huge introvert. The only way for me to be able to talk in a group, is if the group size does not exceed 4 people.

I love reading history. That’s what consumes most of my time. Besides that, I like to take care of my plants. I have been nurturing a few since I moved to Bangalore. It’s a really difficult task. I am a nature lover, like to travel a lot, and also cook, which comes from my mother who specializes in Mughlai cuisine.

More recently, I started trading cryptocurrencies. My husband and I even made a trading bot 🙂

Anything else you’d like to add?

I would really love to point out how wonderful a place the Postman office really is. What makes Postman so wonderful is its people, right from the visionary leadership team to enthusiastic and talented developers, and always smiling HR professionals wearing multiple hats to do the job.

It’s a place filled with awesome and energetic people. One big family working towards the one objective of making API development simpler for the world.

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