Alex’s Blog

Random musings on life, tech, and anything else

Alex Narayan (Data Engineer)

email: [email protected] | website: gigatexal.blog | LinkedIn: alexandarnarayan | Location: Berlin, Germany | Nationality: American

Summary:

Pragmatic and capable engineer with over 12 years of experience in data engineering. I have worn many hats over the years: Database Adminstrator, Python Developer, Site Reliability Engineer, Senior Data Engineer, and Lead Data Engineer. All of my experience from those previous roles has shaped me into a well-rounded and capable engineer that seeks solutions that are managable, cost-effective, well tested, and practical. Alongside technical skills I am a leader who enjoys building performant, happy teams.

Skills: SQL; Python; Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS); Google Cloud Platform (GCP); S3; Airflow; ETL; ELT; Kafka; Git; Shell Scripting; Linux; K8s; Documentation; Training; Data-Modeling; Public Speaking

Experience:

Data Platform Engineer/Senior Data Engineer Blacklane GmbH October 2024 - Current

Led a team of 3 data engineers building out data infrastructure via Terraform on AWS to support Snowflake and Analysts using dbt-core
Built ingestion infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and SQS, Kinesis, Firehose and S3 to process in near real-time 15M records per day compressing and storing it on S3 with no custom written Python reducing potential bug surface areas and maintainance costs
Assisted in the migration of a dbt project (100+ models) from EMR/Hive/Presto to Snowflake
Monitored and Maintained >20+ python source integrations (legacy) and >20+ sources in Fivetran
Developed tooling around Snowflake to make development easier (permission aware database cloning)
Authored new and improved existing Airflow DAGs for use with dbt-core
Championed documentation and knowledge sharing
Led internal trainings
Mentored junior engineers and analysts
Leveraged data quality tools and testing practices to ensure data quality
Created data ingestion and data quality dashboards to monitor data quality
Participated in code reviews, data architecture planning
Planned sprints, aligning greater department goals with each sprint

Lead Data Engineer Smartbroker AG Nov 2023 - Oct 2024

Led a team of 4 senior data engineers in a multi-cloud (AWS & GCP) environment, delivering operational dashboards for stakeholders (reduced delivery time by >70%).
Championed data democratization by designing & implementing a central BigQuery data warehouse (Snowflake-style), reducing new insight delivery from days to hours.
Ensured GDPR compliance through BigQuery Data Catalog & data masking.
Owned data engineering best practices: source control, code linting/formatting, & development workflows.
Fostered a collaborative environment with regular retrospectives, documentation, & mentorship.
Collaborated with stakeholders on cross-team initiatives (e.g., customer deduplication service for improved support success).

Senior Data Engineer Delivery Hero GmbH Jun 2020 - Nov 2023

Designed & operationalized in-house Google Analytics replacement
Coordinated with teams to define key metrics via RFC & ad-hoc investigations. Created GDPR-compliant schema for event ingestion.
Designed, implemented, deployed, & documented CI/CD pipeline for AWS Lambda functions using Github Actions (HR Data Analysts). Prototyped design without production data access.
Migrated >5TB Datawarehouse from Redshift to BigQuery. Validated requirements & migrated core fact and dimension tables. Optimized partitioning & clustering. Migrated Airflow DAGs.
Championed performant & cost-effective BigQuery practices. Reviewed code for efficient queries & identified anti-patterns. Enforced partition filtering where applicable.
Improved interview process: replaced take-home projects with pair-programming coding challenges in Python & SQL during technical interviews. Reduced offer time from 1-2 months to 3 weeks.
Increased code documentation to >95% for critical infrastructure & models with a code review checklist & requirement for Confluence documentation.
Created internal Git & Github guides (written & video) & conducted training after identifying engineer struggles.
Helped to design and operationalize an in-house replacement for Google Analytics.
Educated Analysts from other teams on how to best use our datasets.

Site Reliability Engineer Finleap Connect Oct 2019 - Mar 2020

Assisted other SREs in building DevOps culture & improve cloud-native deployment.
Created monitoring dashboards & consulted on SLAs. Helped maintain Kubernetes infrastructure.
Developed datalake consuming streaming data (Pub/Sub & Cloud Functions) using BigQuery to reduce operational overhead & increase reporting capabilities by >5X.

Python Software Engineer Finleap Connect (Formerly Figo GmbH) Nov 2018 - Oct 2019

Migrated >1TB core product database to Kubernetes using CockroachDB. Wrote scripts for data export & validation. Saved days of engineering time & enabled seamless scaling.
Developed features for the flagship Fintech banking API service in Flask/Python.

Datawarehouse Engineer CorVel Corporation Sep 2017 - Apr 2018

Managed, extended, & triaged internal ETL tool (C# & SSIS).
Designed & deployed extensions to existing dimension and fact tables.
Identified & fixed data quality issues.
Ran, extended, and triaged internally designed ETL tool written in C# that leveraged Microsoft SSIS APIs.

Database Administrator CorVel Corporation Aug 2013 - Sep 2017

Assisted Senior DBAs in configuring, securing, & performance testing SQL Servers.
Reviewed SQL queries & fixed bottlenecks.
Owned database object deployments (21+ databases across 3 environments) & daily production deployments.
Provided on-call support.
Maintained source control (TFS) & trained engineers in best practices.
Developed Python & C# tools to aid DBAs.

Education: BSc. Financial Economics - Brigham Young University - Idaho 2009-2013

References: Available on request

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