Open to opportunities

Adam Nelson

@adamnelson

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Senior Data Engineer specializing in cloud-native ETL/ELT, Snowflake, and streaming analytics.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior-level roles building cloud-native data platforms, emphasizing scalable ETL/ELT, streaming analytics, strong data governance, automation (CI/CD), and collaborative teams that value mentoring and measurable business impact.

I am a Senior Data Engineer with 11 years designing, developing, and optimizing scalable data platforms across AWS, GCP, and Azure for industries including biotechnology, consulting, fintech, and retail. I build high-performance ETL/ELT frameworks using Snowflake, Spark, dbt, and Airflow to deliver automation and business-ready insights.

I have led cloud migration and modernization efforts, implemented streaming analytics and data governance, and delivered measurable outcomes such as cost reductions, latency improvements, and query performance gains. I champion CI/CD, observability, and data quality practices, and mentor distributed engineering teams.

I collaborate closely with analytics, data science, security, and compliance stakeholders to produce ML-ready datasets, enforce PII protections and regulatory requirements, and establish repeatable, modular data platforms that scale across the enterprise.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Nov 2024 - Present (11 months)

Spearheading cloud-based data engineering initiatives supporting R&D, clinical, and supply chain analytics; architected ELT pipelines with Airflow, dbt, and Snowflake ingesting 40+ sources and reduced manual intervention by 60% while cutting Snowflake costs 30%.

Airflow DBT Snowflake AWS Great Expectations Data Governance CI CD

Senior Data Engineer

Deloitte Consulting LLP

Jan 2021 - Nov 2024 (3 years 10 months)

Delivered cloud-native data platform modernizations for Fortune 500 clients, building reusable ingestion and transformation frameworks that reduced delivery timelines by 40% and improved query performance up to 70%.

AWS GCP Kafka DBT Airflow Snowflake Terraform CI CD Performance Tuning

Data Engineer

Stripe, Inc.

Jul 2016 - Dec 2020 (4 years 5 months)

Built scalable batch and streaming pipelines processing billions of transactions daily using Spark, Kafka, and EMR; enabled near-real-time fraud analytics reducing latency from 24 hours to under 10 minutes.

Spark Kafka Snowflake DBT Airflow Data Quality Amundsen

Data Engineer

Target Corporation

Aug 2014 - Jun 2016 (1 year 10 months)

Developed high-volume ETL jobs in Spark and Hive for retail analytics, optimized Redshift schemas to accelerate reporting by 50% and automated incremental data refreshes to ensure near-real-time dashboards.