Nicola Simboli

Senior / Staff Analytics Engineer (Snowflake · AWS)

I design and own scalable analytics foundations that turn raw data into trusted, decision-ready insights. From ingestion to curated datasets, semantic layers and KPI governance, I build systems that scale with product, teams and business complexity.


About

With 15+ years of experience across SaaS, enterprise and consulting environments, I help product-led, remote-first companies build analytics systems that people actually trust and use. My work focuses on analytics engineering, platform ownership and metric reliability, enabling consistent decision-making across product and business teams.

Experience snapshot

I’ve held senior analytics engineering and consulting roles at companies including Docebo, Methode, Ascopiave and CEVA Logistics, working across SaaS and enterprise environments.

  • 15+ years in BI, analytics and analytics engineering
  • SaaS, enterprise and consulting contexts
  • High-scale Snowflake environments on AWS
  • Platform ownership in distributed, remote-first teams
  • Strong focus on reliability, performance and adoption

I’m less interested in trends and buzzwords, and more interested in systems that still work two years later.

Technology

  • Snowflake
  • AWS (S3, Lambda, EventBridge, CloudWatch, ECR)
  • Advanced SQL
  • Python
  • Tableau (Cloud & Server)
  • Looker
  • Git
  • Terraform
  • Docker

Tools matter, but clear ownership, governance and trust matter more.

What I do

  • Owning analytics engineering for product and business analytics
  • Designing curated datasets and dimensional models on Snowflake
  • Defining and enforcing KPI governance and metric consistency
  • Building semantic layers that enable reliable self-serve analytics
  • Scaling analytics platforms used by hundreds to thousands of users
  • Acting as a bridge between product, engineering and business stakeholders

What I avoid

  • Dashboard-only or reporting-only work without ownership
  • Metrics defined without governance, documentation or accountability
  • Platform changes without considering scale, adoption and impact
  • Analytics work disconnected from product and business decision-making

My approach

I approach analytics engineering as a long-term system, not a collection of dashboards or isolated pipelines. In practice, this means:

  • Prioritizing ownership over delivery
  • Designing datasets and metrics that remain reliable as teams grow
  • Treating KPI definitions and semantic layers as products, not documentation
  • Balancing self-serve enablement with governance, performance and cost control
  • Making trade-offs, documenting decisions and aligning stakeholders in remote-first environments

What I care about

I care about analytics that:

  • Is trusted by stakeholders
  • Scales without constant rework
  • Enables autonomy without chaos
  • Supports real decisions, not just reporting

Who I work well with

I tend to work best with:

  • Product-led companies scaling their analytics foundations
  • Teams that value clear ownership and shared standards
  • Organizations transitioning from “BI reporting” to analytics as infrastructure
  • Remote-first companies operating across Europe or globally

Case studies

Metrics & Product Analytics Foundations

Building trust and consistency in product analytics

  • KPI governance / metrics layer
  • Event tracking → metric modeling
  • Product analytics reliability
Improving Product Analytics Reliability Through Platform Ownership

How explicit ownership and reliability-by-design turned fragile analytics pipelines into a dependable decision system.

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Building Reliable Product Analytics Foundations at Scale

Why decoupling event ingestion from analytics modeling was essential to scale product analytics without breaking metrics.

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Building Metric Consistency Through a Governed Semantic Layer

How a governed semantic layer replaced dashboard alignment with durable, reusable metric definitions.

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Data Platform & Optimization

Scaling analytics platforms sustainably

  • Snowflake cost/perf
  • Data pipelines modernization
  • BI platform governance
Scaling Snowflake Sustainably Through Informed Warehouse Sizing

How warehouse sizing based on real query behavior enabled predictable performance and cost control at scale.

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Scaling the Analytics Platform in Line With Organizational Maturity

Why aligning platform growth with clarity of ownership and governance made analytics adoption sustainable.

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Projects

The Open Source Flask Quiz App

The Flask Quiz App is an open-source web application designed to streamline the creation and administration of quizzes. Developed using the Flask framework in Python, this user-friendly platform allows users to effortlessly generate and take quizzes on a wide range of topics. Quiz creators can customize questions and answer options, while quiz takers can provide answers and receive instant feedback on their performance. With its MySQL database backend, user-friendly interface, and potential for future enhancements, the Flask Quiz App simplifies the quiz-taking experience for both educators and learners.

GitHub Repo

January 2024 - Present

GeoClassy Python package

The geoClassy Python package was developed from the need of using GeoJSON files with OpenStreetMap data to classify points which GPS coordinates are known. Using the GeoJSON format as input, the package can also be used with files from sources different from OpenStreetMap.

Examples of use:

  • find the neighborhood of the city with most AirBnB beds;
  • classification of customers by key account area of competence;
  • filter of road accidents in a certain province;
  • assessment of the air quality for a specific Municipality;
  • list of cities affected by the passage of a hurricane.
February 2019 - Present

Amazon best deals about Lego and products for pets

The project is based on reading prices from Amazon e-commerce platforms and to publish the greatest deals to segmented user groups (on Telegram channels and Facebook pages). At this moment there are three groups: users passionate by Lego bricks, owners of cats, owners of dogs. The tool is one hundred percent written in Python 3.x/MySQL and uses several APIs (including Product Advertising API, Telegram API, and Facebook Graph API).

January 2019 - Present

Delivery 74

The website provided a list of shipping fees from several parcel companies in Italy, based on the shipping location, the delivery location, the dimensions, and the weight of the box. Using this platform, casual shipping users could choose the cheapest solution based on the performance level described. I developed every part of the website (mainly in PHP, HTML, MySQL and jQuery) and also designed the User Interface with complex controls (for example autocomplete of locations based on geolocation APIs). The project ended mostly because parcel services didn't have affiliation programs so it was very difficult to monetize the user's experiences.

March 2011 - November 2012

Contact

Let’s talk

I’m looking for a Senior or Staff Analytics Engineer position — remote, EU timezone — at a product-led company where analytics is treated as infrastructure, not reporting.

Most of my career has been spent solving the same class of foundational problems:

  • Metrics that diverge across teams and erode trust in data
  • Product analytics that works at small scale but breaks as usage grows
  • Self-serve that exists in theory, without the governance and ownership to back it up
  • Analytics platforms that become expensive, slow, or politically fragile

These are foundational failures, not tool problems. My focus is on building the layer underneath: trusted datasets, clear metric ownership, and platforms teams can rely on without constant intervention.

I work best where senior IC ownership is the norm, where Product and Data collaborate early, and where long-term thinking is valued alongside short-cycle delivery.

If that describes your team, I’d be glad to hear from you.

How to reach me

You can reach me via:

Good analytics systems are built over time, through clear ownership and trust. If that’s the kind of team you’re building, I’d be glad to talk.