Open to opportunities

Afan Secic

@afansecic

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Data engineer specializing in scalable GCP pipelines, cost optimization, and production reliability.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

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What I'm looking for

I seek a role where I can own production data platforms, improve reliability and cost-efficiency, mentor teammates, and collaborate with ML/analytics teams.

I am a data engineer with 4+ years of experience building and owning production data infrastructure on GCP, focused on operational ownership, reliability, and cost optimization at scale.

At smaXtec I scaled an IoT data platform from ~100K to nearly 1M active devices, designed streaming and batch pipelines (Apache Kafka → BigQuery), and architected a dbt-based warehouse while owning ~90% of dbt models and most production datasets.

I led initiatives in BigQuery cost governance, implemented monitoring and alerting that reduced incident detection time from hours to minutes, and developed data observability dashboards covering ingestion lags, completeness, and distribution percentiles.

My background in ML research (co-author on an Oxford Bioinformatics publication) informs my collaboration with data science teams; I also contribute to CI/CD, best practices, mentoring, and warehouse release management.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Data Engineer

Current

smaXtec GmbH

Nov 2021 - Present (4 years 4 months)

Scaled a production IoT data platform from ~100K to nearly 1M devices, ingesting ~500 GB/day and processing ~15 MiB/s for real-time ML and analytics; led warehouse architecture with dbt and reduced BigQuery costs by thousands of euros through governance and query optimizations.

BigQuery DBT Apache Kafka GCP Python Data Modeling Cost Optimization Kubernetes Datadog

Software Engineer

Anansi Technology Ltd

Apr 2021 - Aug 2021 (4 months)

Built cloud-based backend services integrating insurance logic with major e-commerce platforms via REST APIs; contributed to architecture, performance optimization, and secure data handling.

REST APIs Docker Cloud Services Performance Optimization Backend Development Containerization

Student Researcher

Medical University Graz

Mar 2020 - Sep 2020 (6 months)

Designed and trained GNN architectures for disease subnetwork detection and proposed a model-wide GNNExplainer modification, resulting in a peer-reviewed publication in Bioinformatics (ECCB 2022).

Python Machine Learning Model Interpretability Research

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Graz University of Technology (TU Graz)

Master of Science, Computer Science

2018 - 2022

Activities and societies: Student researcher on GNN architectures for disease subnetwork detection; co-author of a peer-reviewed publication in Bioinformatics (ECCB 2022).

Completed a Master of Science in Computer Science with coursework and projects focused on machine learning, data engineering, and research contributing to ML interpretability.