Open to opportunities

david cheng

@davidcheng

Message

Senior Data Engineer specializing in zero-copy Snowflake lakehouse pipelines and governed AI data workflows.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to build governed, real-time data platforms that accelerate analytics and AI—using zero-copy activation, streaming/CDC, and performance/cost intelligence to deliver sub-second results with strong privacy and Trust Layer compliance.

I’m a Senior Data Engineer with 8+ years of experience building enterprise-scale data platforms at Snowflake and Salesforce. I focus on turning complex data ecosystems into governed, high-performance data products for analytics, CRM, and AI use cases.

At Salesforce, I architected a zero-copy activation layer that surfaces Snowflake data directly into Salesforce Data 360—eliminating duplicate ETL pipelines and delivering real-time freshness. I also led performance tuning and cost intelligence on federated queries, achieving sub-second latency and significant monthly compute cost reduction, while retiring legacy pipelines through secure data sharing and semantic harmonization patterns.

I’ve delivered medallion lakehouse migrations (Bronze/Silver/Gold) that improved query performance by 80% and reduced infrastructure and compute costs. I build real-time CDC and streaming pipelines for 100M+ events/day at 99.99% uptime, and I extend governance into AI workflows—creating Agentforce grounding/audit corpora with Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowpark, plus evaluation harnesses using VARIANT for production-ready, Trust Layer-compliant outcomes.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

Salesforce

Mar 2020 - Present (6 years 3 months)

Architected a zero-copy activation layer integrating Snowflake data directly into Salesforce Data 360, eliminating duplicate ETL and enabling real-time freshness across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Agentforce use cases. Improved federated query performance to sub-second latency while reducing monthly compute costs and built governed AI grounding/orchestration workflows using Snowflake Cortex AI

Salesforce Data 360 SQL Snowflake Snowpark Snowflake Cortex AI Agentforce Federated Query Optimization

Data Engineer

Snowflake

Aug 2017 - Mar 2020 (2 years 7 months)

Delivered enterprise Snowflake Data Cloud migrations using a medallion lakehouse architecture, improving query performance by 80% while significantly reducing infrastructure and compute costs. Built automated pipeline orchestration and real-time Kafka/Snowpipe streaming pipelines handling 100M+ events/day at 99.99% uptime, and optimized workloads with Snowpark (Python) to achieve up to 90x faster

Snowflake Dynamic Tables Snowpipe DBT Query Acceleration Service Clustering & Materialized Views