Hail VS grouparoo

I don't have any funding to hire right now, but I'm always happy to chat about the industry and my experience building Hail (https://hail.is, https://github.com/hail-is/hail), a tool widely used by folks with large collections of human sequences.

The other posters are not wrong about compensation. Total compensation is off by a factor of two to three.

However, it is absolutely possible to work with a group of top-notch engineers on serious distributed systems & compilers in service of an excellent scientific-user experience. I know because I do. We are lucky to have a PI who respects and hires and diversity of expertise within his lab.

I enjoy being deeply embedded with our users. I do not have to guess what they need or want because I help them do it every day.

I also enjoy enmeshing engineering with statistics, mathematics, and biology. Work is more interesting when so many disciplines conspire towards the end of improved human health.

I think this post is identifying scientific computing with simulation studies and legacy workflows, to a fault. Scientific computing includes those things, but it also includes interactive analysis of very large datasets as well as workflows designed around cloud computing.

Interactive analysis of large datasets (e.g. genome & exome sequencing studies with 100s of 1000s of samples) is well suited to low-latency, server-less, & horizontally scalable systems (like Dremel/BigQuery, or Hail [1], which we build and is inspired by Dremel, among other systems). The load profile is unpredictable because after a scientist runs an analysis they need an unpredictable amount of time to think about their next step.

As for productionized workflows, if we redesign the tools used within these workflows to directly read and write data to cloud storage as well as to tolerate VM-preemption, then we can exploit the ~1/5 cost of preemptible/spot instances.

One last point: for the subset of scientific computing I highlighted above, speed is key. I want the scientist to stay in a flow state, receiving feedback from their experiments as fast as possible, ideally within 300 ms. The only way to achieve that on huge datasets is through rapid and substantial scale-out followed by equally rapid and substantial scale-in (to control cost).

[1] https://hail.is

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard | Cambridge, MA | Associate Software Engineer | Onsite

We are seeking an associate software engineer interested in contributing to an open-source data visualization library for analyzing the biological impact human genetic variation. You will contribute to projects like gnomAD (https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org), the world's largest catalogue of human genetic variation used by hundreds of thousands of researchers and help us scale towards millions of genomes in the coming years. We are also developing next-generation tools for enabling genetic analyses of large biobanks across richly phenotyped individuals (https://genebass.org). In this role you will gain experience developing data-intensive web applications with Typescript, React, Python, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform, and will make use of the scalable data analysis library Hail (https://hail.is). Key to our success is growing a strong team with a diverse membership who foster a culture of continual learning, and who support the growth and success of one another. Towards this end, we are committed to seeking applications from women and from underrepresented groups. We know that many excellent candidates choose not to apply despite their capabilities; please allow us to enthusiastically counter this tendency.

Please provide a CV and links previous work or projects, ideally with contributions visible on Github.

email: [email protected]

Reverse ETL is on AirByte's roadmap under the "Future / Not prioritized" section. I wanted to use Grouparoo as a short term solution, but the repo was archived and I think they stopped taking new cloud customers (unknown if this is wrong/outdated).

There are other tools that we will have to adopt in the future but haven’t yet due to lack of necessity. Specifically, one category that is popular in modern data stacks is Reverse ETL (Hightouch, Census, or Grouparoo). We currently don’t have a usecase for piping data back into 3rd party tools but it will definitely come up in the future.

Reverse ETL: Grouparoo, Castled

Grouparoo, the open source Reverse ETL tool we are building, does all of these things. https://www.grouparoo.com

Ingestion / ETL: Airbyte, Singer, Jitsu Transformation: dbt Orchestration: Airflow, Dagster Testing: GreatExpectations Observability: Monosi Reverse ETL: Grouparoo, Castled Visualization: Lightdash, Superset

Grouparoo | Remote (US) | Remote-OK | https://www.grouparoo.com

Grouparoo is a venture-backed software company building open source data tools that make data reliable, accessible, and actionable. We’re empowering teams to make great customer experiences, driven by data. While engineering teams have gotten good at storing and generating data about their customers, it’s rare that this data is used to its full potential in external applications. Grouparoo makes these integrations easy by providing a framework for defining your customer data and reliably syncing it to external tools.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/grouparoo

Here are our open roles:

- Senior Backend / Lead Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/grouparoo/6ba485d1-a5a4-41f0-9fa5-920a...

- Developer Advocate: https://jobs.lever.co/grouparoo/5e1531b4-7ec8-4c10-8e52-fc23...

Tech Stack: TypeScript / Javascript / Node.js, ActionHero, React + Next.js, Postgres & Redis, and whole lot of third-party APIs!

Congrats on the launch! Hightouch looks great and this need is real. Things seem to be going well, so I don't think I'm taking too much away by mentioning that we have been been working on Grouparoo, an open source alternative that solves similar pain points.

A few differences: git developer workflow focused (branches, CI, PRs, etc), ability to self host, segmentation in destinations (tagging people in mailchimp based on rules, for example)

https://www.grouparoo.com

We are building Grouparoo. Obviously, it's a biased sample but we are seeing a few trends at play.

Has anyone heard or used of reverse etl or Hightouch or open sourced Grouparoo?