My Career as a Data Engineer, Architect, Practitioner and Evangelist

I am a software engineer by trade and a data enthusiast by passion and practice.

My success stories that give me a sense of accomplishment

• Laying out a new highly scalable data architecture for Penton Media
• Establishing at Penton, a “lab” culture and infrastructure to practice data management at scale
• Deployment of Penton’s first Hadoop cluster for data processing with HDFS, YARN, HBase and Hive
• Developed the “V1” Big Data strategy for EMC’s GRC platform utilizing Hadoop and Greenplum
• Lead the development and release to market of IBM’s first in-memory data warehouse software
• Built a SQL interface for IBM Informix and DB2 administration commands enabling partners to build their own applications
• Helped several IBM customers with best practices around database clustering, replication, security and performance
• Sharing my insights and experience through conference speaking engagements and publications
• Recognition from peers, fellow technologists and the companies that I worked for – what I feel honored about and consider priceless

My Career Journey

Director, Data Platform, Penton Media          July 2013 to present

• Tasked with building a new scalable data architecture and growing a data development team
• Lead data engineering tasks for all data products
• Interface with Product Management on data requirements
• Build data models, prototypes
• Work with Ops to define and implement infrastructure for data engineering
• Lead research of technologies including the ever-evolving Hadoop Stack, NoSQL data stores and processing frameworks
• Adopt and deploy Pentaho as a data integration and analytics platform atop the Hadoop stack
• Other duties include employee management, contractor management and budgeting

Senior Product Manager, EMC                    June 2012 to present

• Technical product manager for EMC’s GRC platform
• Build and maintain Data Security roadmap for EMC GRC for On Prem and SaaS models
• Develop “V1” Big Data strategy for for GRC platform
• Interface with Business and customers for problem discovery and requirements
• Build Product Demos
• Work with Engineering for requirements prototyping

Various roles, IBM                                    July 2001 to June 2012

• Work with customers to build and optimize their OLTP and OLAP environments
• Develop architecture scoping documents for various relational database components for Informix and DB2
• Manage and lead engineering tasks on database components from design to production
• Build database tools and frameworks around administration and database connectivity including JDBC, .NET and PHP connectors
• Develop code for optimizing Informix SQL Query cost-based optimizer and join optimizations
• Developed code to build OLAP windowing functions in Informix
• Design and implement SQL API for IBM Informix and DB2 administration commands

Engineer and Architect, Informix               February 1999 to July 2001 (Acquired by IBM

• Software engineer and architect for various Informix database components
• Developed code including stored procedures for various components

Speaking Engagements:

• The Practice of Big Data:: Kansas City Lunch n Learn
• A Scalable Data Transformation Framework with Hadoop MapReduce and HBase:: Hadoop Summit, San Jose 2014
• Integrating Hadoop into your Data Processing environment:: DBTA Data Summit 2014
• Data Warehousing with Informix:: IBM Information On Demand Conference, various years
• IBM Informix In-memory Data Warehouse Accelerator:: IBM IOD Conference, customer sites