Open to opportunities

Chirag Simkhada

@chiragsimkhada

Senior Data Engineer specializing in cloud-native lakehouse, ETL/ELT, and real-time analytics for healthcare and finance.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek a senior data engineering role building secure, scalable cloud data platforms and lakehouse architectures, collaborating with clinical or financial teams, and driving automation, governance, and analytics.

I am a Senior Data Engineer with 7+ years building high-performance data platforms across cloud-native and hybrid environments, primarily in healthcare and banking. I design and implement end-to-end ETL/ELT workflows, real-time streaming solutions, and lakehouse architectures using Spark, Kafka, Databricks, Airflow, and modern cloud services.

I have architected scalable solutions on Azure and AWS, modernized legacy systems to Snowflake and Synapse, and led infrastructure automation with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes. My work includes delivering FHIR-based clinical analytics, predictive ML models, and governed pipelines that meet HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC2 requirements.

I collaborate closely with clinical, actuarial, and business stakeholders to create data models, observability, and self-service analytics using Power BI/Tableau. I contribute technical leadership, documentation, and best practices while driving secure, auditable, and production-ready data platforms.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

Highmark Health

May 2023 - Present (2 years 5 months)

Architected a healthcare lakehouse on ADLS Gen2 and Delta Lake integrated with Synapse SQL Pools, built reusable ADF pipelines and Databricks PySpark ETL that enabled secure analytics for patient records and claims while ensuring HIPAA/GDPR compliance.

Azure Data Factory Databricks Pyspark Delta Lake Azure Synapse Azure Key Vault Terraform Power BI

Data Engineer

BOK Financial

Jun 2020 - Mar 2023 (2 years 9 months)

Developed scalable PySpark/Scala ETL pipelines and medallion-layered data lakes on ADLS Gen2, orchestrated workflows with ADF/Airflow, containerized jobs on AKS, and automated infrastructure with Terraform to support financial analytics and reporting.

Pyspark Scala Azure Data Factory Azure Synapse Apache Airflow Docker Kubernetes Terraform Power BI

Big Data Developer

Signify Health

Sep 2018 - May 2020 (1 year 8 months)

Built and optimized Spark and Hive ETL pipelines, implemented near-real-time ingestion with Kafka/Flume, migrated legacy ETL to Spark-SQL, and improved job performance ~30% to support healthcare reporting and analytics.