From Data Analyst To Founder | Bigeye Co-Founder Kyle Kirwan on Leadership in Tech

Kyle Kirwan is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Bigeye, where he leads strategic partnerships, prototype development, and other zero-to-one projects.

Kyle’s journey to founding Bigeye began at Uber, where he helped scale the company’s experimentation and data platforms during a period of hypergrowth. As a product leader and former founding data scientist on Uber’s experimentation platform, he worked on standardizing metrics across thousands of A/B tests that shaped rider, driver, and pricing experiences for millions of users.

It was at Uber that Kyle met Egor Gryaznov. Shortly after Egor joined, he launched Uber’s first SQL bootcamp. Kyle signed up partly out of curiosity, and partly to make sure the new guy actually knew his stuff. They quickly bonded over giving each other increasingly complex SQL challenges to solve.

As Uber’s data ecosystem grew to hundreds of petabytes and thousands of weekly users, Kyle saw a pattern emerge: testing the data pipelines was valuable but didn’t scale. His team experimented with using machine learning models on the daily data profiles of tables in the data lake to see if anomalies could be identified without manually writing data quality checks. This technique would later be termed data observability.

In 2019, Kyle and Egor co-founded Bigeye to use the lessons learned at Uber to transform data management in the enterprise. Today Bigeye serves some of the world’s largest organizations and ensures their data is trustworthy, and that their enterprise AI initiatives are grounded in that trusted data.