NYA Collective
An independent community for engineers building data and cloud platforms. We're starting deliberately, with a small Founding Cohort that will help shape what NYA becomes.
Why NYA exists
Learning real engineering judgement
Most engineers learn data and cloud platforms from tutorials, courses, or certification prep — not from the judgement real production systems demand.
NYA Collective exists to close that gap: practitioners teaching practitioners, real-world engineering scenarios instead of static assignments, and a peer group worth building relationships with.
The NYA Fellowship
A selective, practitioner-led programme
NYA's first initiative: a small group of engineers learn to design, build and reason about production-grade data platforms on AWS — guided by a practitioner who has built them in the real world.
Weekly rhythm
- One ~90-minute group live session.
- One ~60-minute group design review / office hours session.
- Two ~30-minute individual mentoring conversations across the 8 weeks.
- Project work in small engineering teams.
The Founding Cohort
The beginning of NYA Collective
This is the beginning of NYA Collective. The Founding Cohort won't be joining an established community — they'll help shape one.
We're starting small and intentionally. That's a genuine opportunity and a real responsibility for the first Fellows, not artificial exclusivity.
Working target for the first Fellowship: 10 Founding Fellows.
What Fellows will work on
One evolving engineering case, not eight tutorials
A European marketplace's data pipeline is no longer scaling reliably. Fellows design and productionise an AWS-based platform to fix it — and requirements keep changing as the programme goes, ending in an architecture defence rather than an exam.
Who it's for
The Fellow profile
- Studying, working in, or seriously targeting a European engineering career
- Interested in Data Engineering, Data Platforms or Cloud Engineering
- Basic Python and SQL foundations — no prior AWS expertise required
- Comfortable discussing technical topics in English
- Able to commit roughly 4–6 hours per week
- Curious, collaborative, and ready to build
School or company prestige isn't the primary selection criterion. This is a guideline, not a quota — quality and fit matter more than exact composition.
Mentor
A mentor with hands-on experience
The NYA Fellowship is led by a practitioner with experience across Data Engineering, AI Engineering, AWS and Cloud Architecture, analytics, and technical leadership.
Her work has spanned the full engineering lifecycle — from understanding business problems and designing the right models, through algorithms, data and AI systems, data pipelines, and cloud architecture, to systems running in production.
She has designed and built predictive and data-driven systems for real business problems, worked on the data infrastructure and cloud environments supporting them, and contributed to redesigning existing architectures, resolving technical issues, and making systems more maintainable.
Her broader experience also includes technology consulting, team leadership, technical leadership, and mentoring.
- 01Data Engineering, AI Engineering, AWS and Cloud Architecture
- 02Data platforms, AI systems, and analytics
- 03End-to-end technical problem solving
- 04Technical leadership and mentoring
Register interest
Interested in the Founding Cohort?
Applications for the Founding Cohort aren't open yet. Register your interest and we'll follow up once the process starts.
Details will be shared on LinkedIn and GitHub once available.