Open to opportunities

James Preston

@jamespreston3

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Senior Data Engineer specializing in cloud-native data platforms, AI/ML, and clinical data.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior engineering roles building cloud-native data platforms that support AI/ML, prioritize data governance and security, and offer technical leadership and mentorship opportunities.

I am a Senior Data Engineer with 10+ years building cloud-native data platforms across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise domains, focused on scalable ETL/ELT, streaming architectures, and AI/ML support. I design robust data warehouses and pipelines using AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, and orchestration tools to deliver production-ready solutions that meet governance, security, and observability requirements.

I've led platform migrations, implemented feature-store and RAG architectures, fine-tuned NLP models, and introduced dbt and CI/CD practices to reduce runtimes and enable self-serve analytics. I mentor engineers, drive data governance and HIPAA/GDPR-compliant controls, and partner with stakeholders to translate requirements into auditable, reliable data products.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

GE Healthcare

May 2023 - Present (2 years 10 months)

Led build of a cloud-native clinical data platform, consolidating on‑prem warehouses into an AWS lakehouse and enabling analytics and AI workloads; redesigned ETL to ELT pipelines improving data access 3x and concurrent query capacity 4x while reducing runtimes and latency to under 10 minutes for critical dashboards.

AWS S3 Redshift Glue Snowflake Pyspark Kafka DBT Airflow Hugging Face Great Expectations

Senior Data Engineer

SoFi

Aug 2020 - Apr 2023 (2 years 8 months)

Rebuilt core ELT pipelines and data models to support SoFi's bank charter transition, reducing query times from minutes to seconds and enabling near‑real‑time fraud scoring; introduced dbt, CI/CD, and Terraform to standardize deployments and improve reliability.

Snowflake Pyspark Kafka DBT Airflow Terraform Gitlab CI Databricks SQL

Data Engineer

Deloitte

Apr 2017 - Jul 2020 (3 years 3 months)

Led cloud-first data platform builds on Azure, migrating clients from on‑prem databases to ADLS Gen2 and Synapse/Databricks, cutting processing runtimes by over 40% and operational refresh cycles from days to hours while productionizing ML feature pipelines.

Azure Data Factory Databricks Synapse Pyspark Azure ADLS Gen2 Kafka SQL Great Expectations

Junior Data Engineer

BMC Software

Sep 2015 - Feb 2017 (1 year 5 months)

Built and maintained batch and near‑real‑time pipelines into Azure SQL Data Warehouse, migrating reporting from on‑prem Oracle and automating schedules with Control‑M to reduce nightly processing below one hour and lower production incidents.