Casey and her coworkers
BIA alumna and Amazon leader Natalie Casey carves out time to advise students
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Natalie Casey (BSBA 2015) was drawn to Colorado because of the outdoor lifestyle—she loves to hike and kayak. The University of Denver appealed to her, she said, due to its friendly vibe and business program offerings. Initially, Casey thought she wanted to study management, then finance, then, for a short stint, pre-med, until finally landing on analytics.
“I probably changed my [major] at least three or four times,” she said. “I was doing really well in finance, but it just didn’t feel like a perfect fit for me, so one of my professors, Andrew Smith, told me to explore the Analytics/Statistics route. When I started to poke around and get curious, [professors] Kellie Keeling and Amy Phillips were fantastic mentors who helped me discover how I could chart a path in Analytics.”
Natalie Casey
After completing one of the first classes of the business information and analytics program at the Daniels College of Business, Casey joined Hitachi Consulting, where she traveled weekly to consult on Big Data problems out in the real world. That sparked Casey’s interest in big tech. She soon landed job offers from multiple big tech and FAANG companies, including Amazon.
The outdoor enthusiast joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018, choosing Seattle over other offers in California. Casey led a team handling products and tools for data storage and analytics.
“It was highly collaborative with a worldwide team at AWS,” she said. “I loved the opportunity to seek diverse perspectives from people who do what I do but are from totally different areas around the world and are incredibly smart.”
Casey also was the lead Data Engineer on renewable energy projects at Amazon. Amazon, she said, is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world and produces more than 18 million megawatt hours of renewable energy annually—enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for a year, by Casey’s account.
She contributed to Amazon’s goal of powering all operations by 100% renewable energy by 2025, by engineering custom financial modeling and analytics tools that evaluated the ROI and effectiveness of wind and solar renewable energy projects.
“That was awesome because it combined my passion for the environment, for renewable energy and for creating a better world than we currently are—especially holding corporations accountable for their carbon footprint. It makes me really excited that Amazon is focused on this and they’re a leader in the field. It’s inspiring to see,” said Casey, who also was an Ethics Boot Camp leader while at Daniels.
She recently moved back to Colorado, where she now uses her analytics prowess as a senior data engineering leader for the advertising team at Amazon’s Boulder office.
Her team builds the Amazon Marketing Cloud—a holistic measurement and analytics solution built on AWS that provides a secure, private, cloud-based platform for advertisers to perform analytics across the rich Amazon datasets. But, consumer privacy is maintained in the aggregated and anonymized data, so advertisers get more transparency and flexibility in understanding their marketing efforts while customers’ privacy is maintained.
Data privacy, Casey said, is the foundation that underlies Amazon’s culture of innovation—again tying together her passions for ethics, responsible business and data analytics. Casey also said she admires Amazon’s leadership principles, including two new values: “strive to be Earth’s best employer” and “success and scale bring broad responsibility.”
“Treating your employees well and then the impact and responsibility we have to our communities, to the planet and to future generations, and what that means—it’s awesome,” she said.
Natalie Casey
Relocating back to Colorado gave Casey the opportunity to become reengaged with DU after building her career for the last seven years. She now serves on Daniels’ Business Information and Analytics Advisory Board.
“Natalie has been a strong addition to our BIA Advisory Board,” said Kellie Keeling, chair of the Business Information and Analytics Department. “She gives us a great connection into industry and provides us direction around what skills employers want. As an alum, she provides the key insights we need to enhance our analytics curriculum.”
Casey was student body vice president at DU, so she’s no stranger to campus leadership. Except, now, she gives advice to Business Analytics students from the perspective of a large tech employer.
“[The BIA program] prepared me exceptionally well for where I’m at, and I wouldn’t have the career I have without that program, so I want to see it succeed, I want to see it morph and I want to see the students get the opportunities they need, so that’s why I was really excited to plug in to the board; it was the perfect way for me to get involved and give back.”
Casey wants students to know they don’t need to leave Colorado to find an “exceptionally fulfilling career that puts them in a financially sound position and gives them career growth, mentors, the Colorado lifestyle, and a career in big tech.”
“It wasn’t always that way, but it is that way now,” she said, and offers the following advice to students:
- Focus more on learning and understanding the concepts and applying them than on getting a high grade
- Start the job search process early, setting up a timeline and working backwards from that on items to accomplish, such as exploring career fields, reading job descriptions to identify areas of interest and skills to learn, and doing informational interviews and job shadowing
- Use available resources, including Daniels Career Services and faculty, so you don’t have to go through the process alone
“Thinking where you will be years from now is important, but not as important as learning how to think and learning how to apply what you’ve learned,” she said, “so I would soak up all that good stuff, because it’s a great curriculum you receive at Daniels and DU.”
I find it very inspiring to read the paths of my fellow alumni.
Thanks and keep it up. I would like to contribute and return to DU after some 20 plus years.
May be helpful for others and certainly for myself.