Meet Manek Shah, a Paxos Data Analyst based in Singapore

What’s a typical workday like for you? 

I usually kickstart my day with a quintessential Singaporean breakfast of kopi and kaya toast from the cafe across the street. For those unfamiliar, kopi is a strong coffee with condensed milk, and kaya is a sweet coconut jam. It’s delicious! 

Back at my home office, I tackle my inbox and Slack messages and catch up on the latest updates from the US-based team. Because of the time difference between our two regions, I like to split my workday into three parts: 

• A morning session from 8 am to noon. 
• A deep work session between 3 and 5 pm. 
• A short evening session where I take meetings with our US team members. 

It’s a schedule that works for me and a benefit of working at a place with a flexible remote-first policy. 

In the morning, I’ll often meet with product managers across different teams, hashing out the intricate data requirements for upcoming product launches and tracking the results of optimization efforts. The goal here is to ensure that we’re fully aligned and ready to support the team’s efforts. We’ll brainstorm success metrics we’d like to track closely, and work with counterparts in Engineering to ensure our data schema, models and dashboards are ready to meet these needs.

Once noon rolls around, I usually go to the gym for a workout. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is important to me, so I’ll schedule time in the afternoon to grab lunch with friends. If the weather is nice, I like to change things up and move from my home office to a spot by the pool. This is also a conducive time for deep work, such as building new data models or performing complex analysis, such as tracing transactions through multiple hops. I also like to use this time for learning and development — I’m currently training on dbt as part of an analyst upskilling program, which is a great opportunity to delve further upstream into the data-transformation layer of our stack.