Nicholas Passannante

Senior Data Engineer and technical leader with 12 years of experience spanning data engineering, business intelligence, finance, and operations. At Amazon Alexa, I progressed from Financial Analyst through BI and Data Engineering to Senior Data Engineer, ultimately leading the architecture and evolution of large-scale AWS data platforms.

My work has included lakehouse architecture, Spark/PySpark, Python, SQL, Airflow, Redshift, S3, Glue, EMR, streaming systems, data quality, governance, observability, and production reliability. I have built and operated systems processing billions of events per day and led modernization efforts that improved data freshness, reduced infrastructure costs, and simplified complex production environments.

More recently, I have focused on AI-ready data infrastructure, including knowledge graphs, RAG and retrieval datasets, model-evaluation workflows, feature data, and reusable experimentation infrastructure. I also provided technical leadership to six engineers and worked across 15+ Engineering, Product, Data Science, ML, Finance, and Knowledge teams.

My earlier career in accounting and financial analysis gives me a strong business and cost perspective. I tend to approach data platforms not just as engineering systems, but as products that must be reliable, scalable, economical, and useful to the organizations depending on them.