About

I'm Jonathan Talmi, a software engineer based in Toronto.

I studied economics and math at McGill and did research at Bank of Canada.

I worked on analytics teams at Shopify, Instacart, and Super and then discovered my passion for systems and infrastructure. I transitioned into data engineering, started leading engineering teams, and brought those skills to Cohere, where I helped build large-scale datasets for LLMs.

Community is important to me. I run events with Toronto Modern Data Stack, which is the largest community for data professionals in the city. I give talks and sometimes write technical blog posts.

I'm currently building a product in the AI agents space, focused on social agents and multi-agent simulations.

I spend time in Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco. If you're around, give me a shout :)

Talks

• Building a flexible data platform for LLM pretraining data
• Extend the runway: A deep dive into data warehouse costs
• The future of analytics engineering
• Manifest destiny: Orchestrating dbt using Airflow
  
• Getting started with dbt
• Observability within dbt

Work

• Cohere
  I led a team responsible for Cohere's largest datasets (web, code, etc.) and the pretraining data platform.

• Super
  I led a team of 10+ building data infrastructure to support analytics, data science, algorithmic pricing, and experimentation. I helped build a modern data platform with 30+ active developers

• Instacart
  I built tools for analytics/experimentation. And exec dashboards :)

• Bank of Canada
  I published papers on the impact of central bank communication on markets.