Data Engineering Leader (GCP, Python, SQL)

Saleem Arief Syed

430-***-**** ***********@*****.*** TX

Summary

Strategic Data Engineering Leader with 6+ years of experience driving technical initiatives, coordinating cross-functional teams, and improving operational efficiency across cloud-native environments. Strong background in GCP, Python, SQL, and distributed systems, combined with proven strengths in team leadership, troubleshooting, ticketing workflows, on-call support, and process optimization. Adept at aligning technical solutions with business objectives and guiding teams toward high-quality, on-time delivery.

Core Competencies

• Leadership & Operations: Team coordination, mentoring, sprint planning, stakeholder communication, on-call support

• Troubleshooting & Support: Incident response, ticketing systems (Jira/ServiceNow), root-cause analysis, SLA management

• Cloud & Big Data: GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow, Composer), AWS, Azure, Hadoop, Spark

• ETL & Data Integration: Informatica, DataStage, AWS Glue, Sqoop

• Programming: Python, SQL, Scala, MATLAB

• Databases: Snowflake, Redshift, Teradata, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB.

• Automation & DevOps: Docker, Ansible, Terraform

• Visualization: Tableau, Looker Studio, MatplotlibProfessional Experience.

Professional Experience:

TechEra - Irving, Texas

Data Engineer Feb 2023 - Jan 2026

• Coordinated daily engineering activities, ensuring smooth sprint execution and alignment across engineering, QA, and analytics teams.

• Led planning sessions, delegated tasks, and monitored progress to maintain delivery timelines.

• Mentored junior engineers in Python, SQL, and GCP, improving team capability and reducing onboarding time.

• Established communication workflows between product, engineering, and business teams to ensure clarity in requirements.

• Provided on-call support for production pipelines, resolving incidents quickly to maintain SLA compliance.

• Troubleshot pipeline failures, data quality issues, and performance bottlenecks using logs, monitoring tools, and root-cause analysis.

• Managed tickets in Jira/ServiceNow, documenting resolutions and prioritizing issues based on business impact.

• Implemented process improvements for pipeline monitoring, incident response, and documentation standards.

• Designed and maintained scalable streaming pipelines using Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and Apache Beam.

• Built optimized BigQuery datasets supporting real-time dashboards and predictive analytics.

• Managed Airflow-based orchestration and ensured SLAs were consistently met.

Practically - Hyderabad, India

Cloud Data Engineer Sep 2016 - Nov 2020

• Led small project teams during cloud migration initiatives, assigning tasks and ensuring timely delivery.

• Coordinated with BI, product, and engineering teams to prioritize data initiatives and align deliverables with business needs.

• Supported production workloads through on-call rotation, resolving ETL failures and data inconsistencies.

• Troubleshot SQL performance issues, schema conflicts, and cloud resource errors across BigQuery and GCP services.

• Conducted training sessions for new hires on SQL, GCP, and data modeling, strengthening team capability.

• Improved communication flow by establishing weekly sync-ups and structured reporting updates.

• Documented end-to-end data flows, creating reusable process guides that reduced dependency on senior engineers.

• Built Python-based ETL pipelines and SQL models to support analytics workloads.

• Designed star and snowflake schemas for BI and self-service analytics.

• Automated deployments using Terraform and Dataform, reducing manual effort by 40%.

Big Panda Studios - Hyderabad, India

Data Engineer Jan 2016 - May 2016

• Supported team leads by preparing workflow diagrams, documentation, and progress updates for stakeholders.

• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to understand reporting needs and deliver accurate datasets.

• Assisted with troubleshooting API ingestion failures, authentication issues, and data refresh errors.

• Used ticketing systems to track issues, document fixes, and escalate blockers to senior engineers.

• Streamlined communication between engineering and business teams by translating technical concepts into simple language.

• Participated in sprint planning and contributed to improving team processes and delivery timelines.

• Developed ingestion pipelines in Python for Stripe, Intercom, and analytics APIs.

• Built curated BigQuery layers using modular SQL views and automated refresh workflows using Cloud Functions and Cloud Scheduler.

Education

• Campbellsville University - Louisville

MS, Computer and Information Science (Dec 2023).

• Vignan University – India.

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) Electronics and Communication Engineering (Jun 2016).

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