Mick Dreeling

Director, Head of Games Data Science, Analytics & Data Engineering @ Netflix

San Francisco Bay Area · he/him · linkedin.com/in/mdreeling

About

I manage data science, analytics and engineering for Games at Netflix — a cross-functional group working on both portfolio-level and per-studio projects helping Netflix Games reach new heights.

Before that I led Streaming Video Data Engineering at Netflix, where my team owned the datasets that answer what's being watched, on which devices, and how good the playback experience actually is — among the most-touched data at the company. Before Netflix I spent five years at Riot Games scaling their data engineering team to ~35-40 people through League of Legends' biggest years and the early days of Valorant.

Experience

Netflix

Full-time · 7 yrs 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Director — Head of Games Data Science, Analytics & Data Engineering

Jan 2025 – Present

Cross-functional role leading data science, analytics, and data engineering for Games. The teams work on both portfolio-wide and studio-level projects.

Director — Game Data Engineering & Analytics Engineering

Dec 2021 – Feb 2025 · 3 yrs 3 mos

Built the team that develops game analytics at Netflix: analytics engineering, dashboards, iOS and Android SDK integration in Objective-C and Java, real-time pipelines in Flink/Scala, and delivery of metrics to dashboards, UIs and algorithms.

Engineering Manager — Streaming Video Data

Feb 2019 – Dec 2021 · 2 yrs 11 mos

Owned the datasets that answer what's being watched, on which devices, and at what quality of playback experience — one of the most critical datasets at Netflix.

Riot Games

Full-time · 5 yrs 8 mos · Los Angeles

Head of Data Engineering

Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 · 4 yrs 1 mo

Grew Riot's data engineering org to ~35-40 people through League of Legends' biggest years and the early R&D of Valorant. Platform side: Kafka, ElasticSearch, EMR, Vertica, Tableau. Modelling side: telemetry design, fact/dimension tables for the games. Ingested 30B+ events/day; built self-service pipelines used by the whole company.

Engineering Manager — Big Data

Jun 2013 – Dec 2014 · 1 yr 7 mos

Sun Life Financial

9 yrs 2 mos · Waterford, Ireland → Wellesley, MA

Applications Development Associate Director

Jul 2012 – Jun 2013

Technical lead and resource manager for J2EE projects using REST web services and ExtJS.

Applications Development Senior Manager

Feb 2010 – Jul 2012 · 2 yrs 6 mos

Senior Software Engineer (Applications Development Analyst)

May 2004 – Feb 2010 · ~6 yrs (Waterford → Wellesley)

Java engineer with Weblogic/Flex; mostly the automated workflow system for Sun Life.

Earlier

Waterford, Ireland · 2002 – 2004

Software Engineer / IT Manager at Bolands Waterford (Automotive Group) and at James F. Wallace & Co. Chartered Accountants — custom PHP / Java applications and general IT.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Master's Degree, Data Science · 2025

Math, statistics and machine learning; causal inference, research ethics, and data engineering.

Waterford Institute of Technology

Master's Degree, Computer Science · 2014 · First Class Honors

Distributed Computing and Enterprise Component Development.

Beyond work

The hobby pile, mostly hardware. Some of it actually ships.

iOS — built apps back in 2009/2010.

FPGA — soldered an OSSC from off-the-shelf components.

Electronics — fixing broken guitar effects and Neo-Geo consoles.

Cars — old engines, mostly.

Blockchain — wrote a Litecoin clone (with Dark Gravity Wave retargeting) named after my dog.

This site — analytics.dreeling.com, built on a weekend.