Sonali Sharma a data engineer on the data personalization team at Netflix, which, among other things, delivers recommendations made for each user. The team is responsible for the data that goes into training and scoring of the various machine learning models that power the Netflix home page. They have been working on moving some of the company’s core datasets from being processed in a once-a-day daily batch ETL to being processed in near real-time using Apache Flink. A UC Berkeley graduate, Sonali has worked on a variety of problems involving big data. Previously, she worked on the mail monetization and data insights engineering team at Yahoo, where she focused on building great data-driven products to do large-scale unstructured data extractions, recommendation systems, and audience insights for targeting using technologies like Spark, the Hadoop ecosystem (Pig, Hive, MapReduce), Solr, Druid, and Elasticsearch.