Principal Data Platform Architect

High-agency Principal Data Engineer / Founding Architect with 13 years of experience designing, scaling, and taking complete ownership of high-throughput data platforms in complex, high-stakes environments (biotech R&D and global development). Specializes in Zero-to-One Architectures, designing and scaling robust lakehouse infrastructures (Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, BigQuery) to transform fragmented, multi-source raw streams into clean, reliable analytical surfaces. Implements automated, self-healing "trust gates" using Great Expectations and schema-validation pipelines for 100% downstream data integrity. Re-engineers legacy batch workloads into optimized, containerized DAGs (Airflow, PySpark, Terraform), cutting processing latency by up to 65% and reducing cloud compute overhead by 25%. Led and mentored high-performing engineering teams of 12+, establishing modern DataOps and SRE monitoring postures (Prometheus/Grafana) that cut incident response times by 60%. Previously: Principal Data Engineer at GSK (R&D Analytics), Senior Data Engineer at The World Bank (won the Technology Excellence Award in 2020). Seeking Founding Engineer, Principal Data/Platform Engineer, or Technical Architect roles in high-trust, high-agency environments where system design and engineering directly drive business strategy.