Kyle Kirwan

Kyle Kirwan is co-founder of Bigeye, the data observability company he started in 2019 with Egor Gryaznov. Both came from Uber's data teams.

Uber's First SQL Bootcamp

Kirwan started at Uber as a data scientist in 2013, he told VatorNews, and watched its data grow from about 100 data sets to more than 100,000. He met Gryaznov when Gryaznov led Uber's first SQL bootcamp shortly after joining. According to Bigeye, Kirwan attended "just to make sure this new Egor guy actually knew his stuff," and the two bonded over giving each other harder and harder SQL challenges.

Testing Pipelines That Did Not Scale

Kirwan became a product manager for Uber's data platform organization and led a team that built internal tools used by about 3,000 people a week. As the data ecosystem grew to hundreds of petabytes, his team experimented with running machine learning models on daily profiles of tables to spot anomalies without manually written checks, a technique, his Bigeye profile says, that would later be called data observability.

The company itself, he said, was inspired by conversations with data people who left Uber and "missed the data testing, observability, and incident management tools we had."