Summer internship experience at Lowe's Companies Inc.

This summer I got a wonderful opportunity to work at Lowe's Companies, Inc. as a Data Engineer Intern. I was part of Lowe's DACI team which delivers data-driven solutions and products for improving Lowe's Pro customer sales.

Throughout the internship, I was exposed to various big data technologies such as Apache Airflow, Hadoop, Spark, and Python. Working alongside a skilled team of Data Engineers and Analysts, I gained valuable insights into the implementation of projects involving Big data and witnessed the collaborative efforts of data teams in solving complex problems.

My tasks primarily revolved around modernizing big data pipelines. I was responsible for migrating an Apache Oozie job to Airflow DAG, which improved the orchestration and monitoring of a data pipeline exporting data from Hive tables. Additionally, I worked on enhancing Hive queries to meet additional requirements from the analytics team. Exploring Spark scala further allowed me to learn how data pipeline processing time can be optimized using various techniques. I also worked on onboarding a code repository to an internal DevOps solution, eliminating the need for Jenkins in CICD.

Besides my project tasks, the internship program provided a series of valuable Speaker Series and AI Demo day events. I had the privilege of listening to prominent leaders such as Marvin Ellison , Seemantini Godbole and Nishant Gupta . Their sessions helped me develop a broader understanding of the company's vision, goals and inspirational tech initiatives involving AI and Data.

I am immensely grateful to my manager, Sivaramakrishnan Subramanian, for his guidance and support throughout the internship. My mentor, Eric Wuerfel , also helped me learn a lot and understand various approaches to DE usecases. It was truly an honor to have the opportunity to work with them both and other team members of my team.

I also interacted with fellow interns and leads across Data Science and Software Engineering teams, gaining a broader perspective of how our teams relate to each other and work towards a common goal.

Special thank you to Amy Beekley and Scotty Creelman for the amazing organisation of the entire internship program. Right from the inital interview process to organising various fun events for interns to learn and grow together while making connections, their management has delivered a great internship experience to us.

I am also thankful to Prof. Gaurav Shekhar and Prof. Sivya Leventhal from The University of Texas at Dallas for their constant encouragement and support. I want to thank Prof. Antonio P. for his guidance in the course Big Data Analytics, which equipped me with the essential concepts that proved invaluable in relating to my project tasks during this internship.

As I return to school, I carry with me the invaluable lessons and experiences from Lowe's. The internship has motivated me to further enhance my skills in the exciting world of Data and AI. I am forever grateful to Lowe's for this opportunity to grow, and I couldn't have asked for a better internship experience!

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