Internship Experience at NuEra Automotive Solutions

NuEra Automotive solutions(NEAS) is the software wing of the Net Direct conglomerate companies which include Net Direct Autos, Prioritize Success, NuEra Managed Services & HCR Lifts.

NEAS provide software solutions in the retail automobile industry in an efficacious way so as to create rippling effects, uplifting the industry standards by setting new benchmarks. Our motto is to bring about disruptive changes in the auto buying experience and we are for sure inching towards perfection day by day. I have had opportunity to be a pioneer member of the analytics team in NEAS from the summer of 2020 and got that extended to this fall.

When I got my internship extended from summer to fall I was elated by the prospect of working with a great team with a future onlooking grandiose plan. I have had the liberty to explore the latest technologies and to implement the plan in the best way possible. I worked as a data analyst intern who had the responsibility of building up a big data analytic platform bringing together different tools and technologies to work in conjunction to facilitate a data lake architecture. The main crux was to build data pipelines and storage mechanisms to effectively warehouse all the data which would serve the purpose of an AI/ML driven predictive and prescriptive analytics platform. I had the opportunity to work on developing fully automated ETL/ELT pipelines to fetch batch and stream data, process them and channel them by compartmentalizing the data according to the business use cases. I was responsible for building and managing a multi tenant big data platform which basically crunches raw data from its inception point and transforms them into useful insights with the help of big data tools and technologies. I have been exposed to designing franchise KPI dashboards with specific metrics provided by the business team, creating dashboards and drawing useful insights and furthermore, run machine learning models with the historic data channeled and stored by the big data architecture.

It was a great revelation as to how different working parts fall in place to run the business efficiently. To put in simpler terms, I was working under the supervision of people who had around 10-20 years of industry experience and that in itself has given me a great deal of real time knowledge. I worked under the supervision of Murali Kashaboina whom I consider my mentor and with my colleague/teammate/friend Sujeeth Shetty. The fast pace at which the work progressed never felt tiresome to me because of the constant brainstorming sessions we had on building up the framework. The technology stack which is being handled in the architecture speaks for itself on how it is going to bring disruptive changes.

I got hands-on on a variety of technologies and tools which was introduced to me at my university, the university of Texas at Dallas(UTD). I explored more into the world of big data and its real time uses and implications. I have had the opportunity to work as an ETL developer leveraging various ETL tools and finding how they are interlinked and how they can can be exploited for better results. I honed my analytic skills working with the ace and adept. I got exposed to the AWS cloud computing platform, concepts of Big Data Analytics, data engineering & data visualization, Apache tools like NiFi, Airflow, Presto, Superset etc. channeling streaming data from Kafka topics to Hive/Hbase warehouse using Spark jobs, and automating ETL jobs using Pentaho BI. The technology stack we use here is an eye opener at the least.

I should thank my professors at UTD who helped me cope up with the requirements of the ever growing industry.I extend my sincere gratitude to Murali Kashaboina, Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Architect, for being a great mentor and a true leader, whose insights and feedback helped me immensely. I also would like to thank Sherry Smith,Anand Damaraju,Romana Rasheed and Mehdi Razvi for making my life easier with their constant support. And I would like to express my gratitude towards Keith Halbert, Chief Digital Officer, for giving me this opportunity to prove myself and to be part of such a distinguished initiative.

I am glad to have worked in a team where everyone knows what they are doing, why they are doing and how they have to do it. It was nothing short of a challenging experience but the technical advancement I attained by working for NuEra and the camaraderie the people hold for each other in this company are worth experiencing.