Biography

My name is Sergio Sánchez Zavala and I’m originally from Tijuana, Baja California, México. I’m a Senior Data Engineering Leader with 7+ years architecting enterprise-scale data infrastructure and pioneering AI-powered operations. I’m dedicated to making research transparent and reproducible while transforming data capabilities at mission-driven organizations.

I’m passionate about building data platforms that scale, implementing AI/ML solutions that drive real impact, and establishing data governance frameworks that enable organizational strategy and innovation.

I’m also:

🌮📊 the founder of @tacosdedatos - tacosdedatos.com
the premier Spanish-language data science community with 1,100+ active members, 10K Twitter followers, and 20K TikTok followers
🧑🏼‍🔬🎨 a senior data engineer at TalkingPoints - where I lead data infrastructure powering multilingual communication for 5M+ students, families, and educators

Interests

Data Visualization
Social Tech
Public Policy

Education

B.A. in Economics, 2016

University of California, Davis
B.A. in International Relations, 2016

University of California, Davis

Experience

July 2023 - Present

Remote

Senior Data Engineer

TalkingPoints

Lead architect for data infrastructure powering multilingual communication between 5M+ students, families, and educators across 140+ languages.

Scaled Data Infrastructure: Designed and optimized Snowflake + dbt pipelines processing 1.5B+ messages, enabling near real-time analytics and reporting for product and business teams
Pioneered AI/ML Capabilities: Built and deployed production NLP pipelines for sentiment analysis, intent recognition, and entity extraction; implemented CLIO-inspired conversation segmentation and topic clustering delivering actionable insights
Drove Strategic Impact: Partnered with product, research, and operations teams to deliver data products that inform strategy, measure program impact, and improve student outcomes
Established Data Excellence: Implemented data governance standards and documentation practices, reducing ad-hoc data requests by 40% while increasing organizational trust in metrics
Optimized Operations: Led performance tuning initiatives that reduced Snowflake costs by 70%, accelerating decision-making while saving significant resources
Championed AI Operations: Advocated for and built AI-Ops initiatives, integrating LLMs into internal workflows to boost cross-team productivity and automation

April 2022 - July 2023

Remote

Data Engineer

TalkingPoints

Built foundational data infrastructure supporting multilingual education communication platform.

Developed initial NLP pipelines for message analysis and sentiment extraction
Collaborated with product teams to establish key metrics and reporting frameworks
Built data infrastructure supporting platform growth and user analytics
Earned promotion to Senior Data Engineer in recognition of technical leadership and impact

April 2021 - April 2022

Oakland, CA

Data Engineer

Alluma

Modernized data architecture and enabled data-driven culture transformation.

Modernized Data Architecture: Led adoption of modern data models and architecture patterns, developing and managing Snowflake data warehouse and Airflow data pipelines
Enabled Self-Service Analytics: Designed and built dashboards and self-service tools in various BI technologies for internal teams and client-facing solutions
Drove Data Culture: Conducted technical training on data concepts and tools; developed best practices for data analysis, reporting, and visualization
Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborated with functional area leaders to identify opportunities for operational efficiency and data-driven transformation

March 2020 - April 2021

Oakland, CA

Data Visualization Analyst

Alluma

Built ETL infrastructure and analytics solutions for social services organization.

Developed ETL jobs and tests to process, validate, and distribute data across multiple systems
Created comprehensive documentation and style guides for data visualization best practices
Built client-facing analytics solutions and internal operational dashboards
Conducted technical training on data concepts and visualization tools

February 2019 - Present

Latinoamérica

Founder

tacosdedatos

As the creator/founder of tacosdedatos my responsibilities vary but three main ones are:

Research, write and publish content as well as reach out to potential content creators.
Create marketing materials for our content and push them on to the right channels
Maintain the website t acosdedatos.com/

January 2018 - March 2020

San Francisco, California

Research Associate

Public Policy Institute of California

Conducted advanced statistical analyses on immigration and education policy impacts.

Conducted advanced statistical analyses on immigration and education policy impacts
Published peer-reviewed research reaching national audiences
Presented technical workshops at major conferences (PyCon US 2019/2020, NACIS)
Developed open-source tools for census data analysis and geospatial policy research

May 2017 - October 2018

Davis, California

Data Analyst

Davis Joint Unified School District

Prepared, analyzed, and presented school climate data for stakeholders in the school district.

Notable Achievements & Leadership

Community Building & Thought Leadership

Founder, tacosdedatos.com

Built premier Spanish-language data science community reaching 1,100+ active members, 10K Twitter followers, and 20K TikTok followers

Open Source Impact

Created Datawrapper Python SDK, pypums (Census data access), and spotify-to-sqlite - tools actively used by data teams at major news organizations and research institutions