Journey

A timeline of my professional growth and learning progression. This isn't a resume—it's a story of how I've evolved as an engineer, the pivotal moments that shaped my thinking, and the skills I've developed along the way.

Cloud Data Lake Lead – Migration & Modernization

Leading Cloud Data Lake Migration (2024–2025)

After building foundational data engineering capabilities, I was promoted to lead the migration of Acme Corp’s analytics platform from on-premises Hadoop to a modern AWS-based data lake. This was a high-visibility, cross-functional project with major business impact.

Key Milestones

  • Designed and implemented a medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold layers) on S3
  • Led a team of 8 engineers and analysts through a 9-month phased migration
  • Automated ETL with AWS Glue and dbt, enabling hourly data refreshes
  • Established data quality gates and monitoring with Great Expectations
  • Enabled self-service analytics for 200+ business users via Athena and Tableau

Impact

  • Reduced infrastructure costs by 60% and improved query performance 10x
  • Enabled new use cases: real-time fraud detection, ML model training on full datasets
  • Created a culture of cloud-first, automation-driven analytics

This project positioned Acme Corp for the next generation of data-driven growth and innovation.

Data Engineering Foundations at Acme Corp

Laying the Groundwork for Scalable Analytics

In 2017, I joined Acme Corp as their first dedicated data engineer. The company was transitioning from spreadsheet-based reporting to a centralized analytics platform. My initial focus was on building robust ETL pipelines, automating data ingestion from Salesforce, Google Analytics, and internal databases.

Key Milestones

  • Designed and implemented the first data warehouse using Amazon Redshift
  • Automated daily ETL jobs with Apache Airflow, reducing manual effort by 90%
  • Established data quality checks and alerting for pipeline failures
  • Collaborated with analysts to define core business metrics and data definitions

Impact

  • Enabled self-service analytics for business users
  • Reduced report delivery time from 3 days to 2 hours
  • Created a culture of data ownership and documentation

This foundational work set the stage for future growth, allowing Acme Corp to scale its analytics capabilities as the business expanded.