Nikola Maksimovic is an analytics engineer whose career path is a playbook for anyone switching into data from a non-technical role. He began in digital marketing, holding startup marketing roles in London and Berlin and working in growth marketing at Ecosia, before a pandemic-driven pivot into BI and analytics engineering.

On the technical side, Nikola has spearheaded a company-wide dbt migration and works on the data modeling decisions that come with it, from wide versus narrow tables to incremental strategies. His daily toolkit spans the modern data stack, including Snowplow, dbt, Looker and LookML, Redshift, Airflow, Airbyte, and Redash, along with A/B testing frameworks and product analytics implementation. He is also well versed in the practical differences between analytics engineering and data analyst roles.

Nikola documents the learning path that worked for him, from Excel to SQL, dashboards, and meaningful portfolio projects, along with the networking and mentorship tactics that opened doors, helping marketers and other career switchers plan realistic transitions into analytics engineering.