Shahab
Profile
Senior Engineering Leader & Data Infrastructure Specialist with 7+ years of experience designing, scaling, and operating petabyte-scale cloud platforms, streaming engines, and AI-accelerated data systems. Technical leader skilled in coaching engineers, authoring architecture RFCs, driving AI adoption, and aligning quarterly OKRs across engineering workflows.
Experience

Senior Data Engineer & Technical Lead

Kraken
Jan 2026 – PresentRemote
  • Spark & Data Cloud Performance: Spearheaded end-to-end performance engineering of high-throughput Spark batch and lakehouse pipelines for crypto compliance reporting, reducing cluster compute resource consumption by 90% and runtimes by 50%.
  • Technical RFC & Architecture Leadership: Authored technical architecture briefs (RFCs) and led design reviews for multi-tenant relational schemas and partitioning, implementing metadata-driven pruning to guarantee data integrity under peak transactional load.
  • Incident Response & SLA Observability: Managed on-call first-responder rotations and incident response workflows; architected automated pipeline verification checks and Airflow SLA monitoring to shield engineers from reactive toil.
  • Cross-Functional & OKR Leadership: Partnered with Product, Security, and Compliance stakeholders to align quarterly OKRs and deliver audit-safe data microservices for critical business verticals.
Technical LeadershipRFCs & ADRsApache SparkAirflowPartition PruningComplianceScala

Senior Data Engineer

Shopify
Jan 2023 – Jan 2026Remote
  • Distributed Streaming Infrastructure: Architected and operated real-time Flink and Kafka streaming pipelines processing billions of merchant events daily, improving search response times by 60% across core platform infrastructure.
  • Engineering Mentorship & Best Practices: Established reusable platform testing libraries and automated validation workflows using dbt and Airflow, reducing data processing anomalies by 20% while coaching and mentoring junior engineers.
  • AI Adoption & Autonomous Tooling: Co-architected an autonomous LLM platform using ReAct loops to diagnose and self-heal operational pipeline failures; engineered an Agent Coordinator consuming Kafka streams, querying pgvector stack traces, and validating SQL patches in Docker sandboxes.
  • Data Lakehouse Modeling: Designed robust relational storage models and paved-road schemas for store hierarchies, establishing deterministic data lineage for downstream analytics engines.
MentorshipApache FlinkKafkadbtAirflowpgvectorPythonDockerReAct LLMs

Data Scientist

Shopify
Jun 2021 – Dec 2023Remote
  • Event Analytics at Scale: Analyzed billions of platform events using statistical models in Python and SQL, driving core architecture and query engine design changes across platform data services.
  • Python Engine Optimization: Optimized high-volume event-logging schemas and Python/Scala data extraction scripts, improving analytical search runtimes by 15%.
  • Validation Pipelines: Partnered with Backend teams to translate complex business logic into production calculation workflows and automated validation pipelines.
PythonScalaEvent TelemetryStatistical ModelingValidation

Data Scientist

Gale Partners
Sep 2020 – Jun 2021Remote
  • AWS Cloud & Docker Automation: Built and automated scalable Docker-based ETL pipelines on AWS (S3), utilizing GitHub Actions CI/CD to optimize schema performance and model deployment speed by 40%.
AWSDockerETL PipelinesPythonMarketing Analytics

Data Scientist

Tangerine Bank
Oct 2018 – Sep 2020Toronto, ON
  • Cloud Compute Cost Optimization & FinOps: Optimized GCP database schemas and query performance for banking telemetry, cutting cluster operational compute costs by 10% while integrating predictive credit validation workflows.
GCPSQLBanking TelemetryPredictive Credit ModelingFinOps
Education
GRADUATE DEGREE

Master of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.)

Electrical Engineering & Quantum Information
University of Waterloo | Waterloo, ON
UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE

Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.)

Nanotechnology Engineering
University of Waterloo | Waterloo, ON
Skills & Capabilities

Leadership & Management

EM & Mentorship
Technical RFCs & ADRsEngineer MentorshipSprint Execution & OKRsIncident & On-Call ManagementCross-Functional AlignmentAI Adoption

Programming Languages

Core Languages
PythonScalaSQLRustJavaBash

Frameworks & Data Engines

Compute & ML
Apache SparkApache FlinkApache BeamdbtScikit-LearnTensorFlowPyTorchKeras

Infrastructure & Cloud

Cloud & Ops
AWSGCPKubernetesDockerApache AirflowApache KafkaPostgreSQLClickHouseRedis
Interests & Pursuits
📚
Sci-Fi Literature
Hard Sci-Fi & Speculative
🎲
D&D Tabletop
Campaign Strategy
🧗
Bouldering & Running
Outdoor Trails & Climbing
🏋️
CrossFit
High-Intensity Training
© 2026 Shahab