Alex Narayan (Data Engineer)

Location: Berlin, Germany

Nationality: American

Summary:

Data engineering leader with 12+ years across database administration, Python development, SRE, and data platform engineering. Builds practical, cost-effective, well-tested solutions and leads high-performing, happy teams.

Skills:

SQL; Python; AWS; GCP; Terraform; Airflow; dbt; Snowflake; BigQuery; Kafka; S3; Git; Linux; Kubernetes; ETL/ELT; Data Modeling; Documentation; Training; Public Speaking

Experience:

Data Platform Engineering Manager Blacklane GmbH May 2026 - Current

Lead a team of 3 data engineers building an AWS/Snowflake data platform, enabling data-driven decisions across Blacklane
Implement company-wide GDPR data masking in Snowflake and the Omni reporting layer
Write RFCs; run internal trainings and demos (e.g., GDPR)
Plan sprints, set team KPIs, run retrospectives
Train and coach junior engineers

Data Platform Engineer Blacklane GmbH October 2024 - May 2026

Led a team of 3 engineers building AWS infrastructure (Terraform) for Snowflake and dbt-core
Built near real-time ingestion (SQS, Kinesis, Firehose, S3) processing 45M records/day with no custom Python
Migrated a 100+ model dbt project from EMR/Hive/Presto to Snowflake
Maintained 20+ Python integrations and 20+ Fivetran sources
Developed Snowflake tooling (permission-aware cloning) and Airflow DAGs for dbt-core
Mentored juniors and analysts; led internal trainings; championed documentation
Owned data quality: built ingestion/quality dashboards and testing practices

Lead Data Engineer Smartbroker AG Nov 2023 - Oct 2024

Led 4 senior engineers in a multi-cloud (AWS & GCP) environment; delivered stakeholder dashboards >70% faster
Designed a central BigQuery warehouse, cutting insight delivery from days to hours
Ensured GDPR compliance via BigQuery Data Catalog and data masking
Owned engineering practices: source control, linting, dev workflows; fostered retrospectives, documentation, mentorship

Senior Data Engineer Delivery Hero GmbH Jun 2020 - Nov 2023

Designed and operationalized an in-house Google Analytics replacement with a GDPR-compliant event schema
Built and documented a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline for AWS Lambda (HR analytics)
Migrated a 5TB+ Redshift warehouse to BigQuery: fact/dimension tables, partitioning, clustering, Airflow DAGs
Enforced cost-effective BigQuery practices: partition filtering, anti-pattern review
Overhauled hiring: pair-programming challenges replaced take-home projects, cutting time-to-offer from 1-2 months to 3 weeks
Raised code documentation to 95%+; created internal Git/GitHub guides (with video); trained teams on best use of datasets

Site Reliability Engineer Finleap Connect Oct 2019 - Mar 2020

Built DevOps culture and cloud-native deployment practices with other SREs
Created monitoring dashboards; consulted on SLAs; maintained Kubernetes
Built a streaming datalake (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, BigQuery), increasing reporting capability 5x

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

Migrated a 1TB+ product database to Kubernetes/CockroachDB with export/validation scripts, saving days of engineering time
Developed features for the flagship fintech banking API (Flask/Python)

Datawarehouse Engineer CorVel Corporation Sep 2017 - Apr 2018

Managed, extended, and triaged the internal C#/SSIS ETL tool
Designed and deployed extensions to dimension and fact tables
Identified and fixed data quality issues

Database Administrator CorVel Corporation Aug 2013 - Sep 2017

Assisted senior DBAs configuring, securing, and performance-testing SQL Servers
Reviewed queries, fixed bottlenecks; owned deployments across 21+ databases and 3 environments
Provided on-call support
Maintained TFS source control; trained engineers; built Python/C# tooling for DBAs

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