Ross Gibson

I spent nine years at Kraft Heinz, which is about seven longer than I expected when I started there as a financial analyst in 2016. Back then I was building Excel and VBA models so HR could budget a billion dollars a year. By the time I left I was writing Python pipelines into Snowflake and had just finished a stint helping roll out an AI-driven hiring platform. In September 2026 I join Google as a Data Program Manager on the Finance Data and Analytics team.

The move from finance to data happened slowly. I kept automating pieces of my own job, the automations kept being more interesting than the job itself, and at some point it stopped being a side activity. I went back to school at DePaul for a master’s in data science while still working full time. My undergrad on the other hand is in finance, from the University of Iowa.

Most of it comes down to being curious. I like learning things I have no business knowing yet and then building something with them, and that is where nearly everything on this site started. Picking up an unfamiliar language, or a board I have to solder before it will do anything, is the reason I start rather than a cost of starting.

The work I am proudest of professionally is usually the work nobody notices, because it runs. Pipelines that hold their schedule. dbt models people argue from instead of about. Dashboards that do not quietly lie to you. Mostly Python, SQL, dbt, Dagster, Snowflake and Azure.

What is on my GitHub is a different thing entirely. Those are nights and weekends: Ethereum indexers in Rust, soil sensors I soldered myself running C firmware I wrote, a tracker that keeps my 3D printer honest about how much filament it has left. Almost none of it is what I was trained to do, which is most of the appeal.