# Jakub Kříž **Role:** Data & Cloud Architect **Location:** Prague, Czech Republic (Europe/Prague) **Languages:** cs, en **Contact:** hello@cybrainia.cz > Twenty years in IT — from tracking and web analytics through data engineering into AI transformation. Prague, Czech and English. Twenty years in IT and I still have not found a good reason to leave. The technology has turned over completely two or three times since then; the interesting problems have barely changed. ## Where I came from I got to data engineering through measurement, and that explains a fair amount about me. For years my job was trackers: writing them, instrumenting sites with them, taking other people's apart when a client had a bad feeling about a vendor, and arguing in public about tracking consent. Google Analytics and GTM, a proxy open all day, reading other people's minified JavaScript to work out where the data was really going. That is why I build warehouses the way I do. I do not trust data whose origin I cannot trace — when you have spent years watching numbers get lost between two systems or mangled by a misconfigured tag, you stop treating the source as a given. And I know what a bad collection layer costs one floor down: most warehouse problems were created before anyone started modelling. Then came data engineering, and with it BigQuery, dbt, Dataform, dlt, Terraform and Google Cloud. Today the centre of the work is AI transformation — I co-develop and co-maintain an AI platform — and data is not a side topic in it, it is the fuel. Most of my attention right now goes to an open semantic layer outside proprietary BI tools, and to the data catalogs that agentic AI has brought back into play. I teach at VŠE Praha, run workshops in the Google for Partners programme, and have spoken at DataRestart and MeasureCamp. I do it because explaining something is the fastest way to find the holes in your own understanding, and because the field gave me a lot of knowledge for free on the way up. There is a debt there. ## Away from the screen Linux has been my daily driver since 2009. Not as a statement — it is simply where I am comfortable, and knowing the layer underneath the managed services turns out to matter more often than you would expect. I support [CZ.NIC](https://www.nic.cz/) and the [Turris](https://www.turris.com/) project. I perform and teach improvisational theatre. On a technical site that looks like an unrelated hobby and it is not: listening before answering, accepting what the other person offered instead of overriding it with your own, and committing without certainty are exactly what a design review runs on too.