Open to opportunities

Karma Gurung

@karmagurung

Senior Data Engineer specializing in scalable Azure lakehouse, real-time streaming, and governed healthcare/banking pipelines.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a role where I can lead end-to-end data engineering—building governed batch and real-time Lakehouse pipelines on Azure/Microsoft Fabric, driving performance and cost optimization, and working on healthcare or financial systems with strong compliance.

I’m an accomplished Senior Data Engineer with over 14 years of experience creating and implementing scalable data engineering solutions across healthcare, banking, and financial sectors. I build comprehensive batch and real-time pipelines that deliver reliable data ingestion, transformation, and delivery at enterprise scale.

My core strength is delivering modern Lakehouse and medallion architectures with strong data modeling—using Azure (ADF, Databricks, Synapse, ADLS Gen2) alongside Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric. I’ve led real-time replication and alerting pipelines using streaming frameworks like Kafka and Flink, and I focus on performance and cost optimization through Spark tuning and query optimization.

I also bring deep experience in compliance-driven data engineering, integrating healthcare interoperability using HL7 FHIR standards while maintaining HIPAA and SOX adherence. As a lead, I manage teams (5+ members), set architecture best practices, and drive governance using Azure Purview, RBAC, encryption, and lineage so data is secure, discoverable, and ready for analytics.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Lead Data Engineer

Current

Highmark Health

Nov 2022 - Present (3 years 7 months)

Architected real-time patient-vitals ingestion with Azure Stream Analytics to alert providers on anomalies and led enterprise ETL/ELT delivery, building 50+ production pipelines with PySpark, dbt, and Azure Data Factory. Managed a 5+ member team and delivered CDC/replication and lakehouse architectures (HVR, Delta/Iceberg) with HIPAA-compliant governance via Purview/RBAC.

Azure Stream Analytics Azure Data Factory Pyspark Snowflake Apache Kafka Apache Flink HL7 FHIR Azure Functions

Senior Data Engineer

Molina Healthcare

Feb 2019 - Oct 2022 (3 years 8 months)

Designed Azure lakehouse pipelines and medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) to process Medicaid claims and member eligibility, implementing near-real-time CDC with HVR and Kafka. Built ELT workflows with Airflow, dbt, and Matillion to load ADLS/Synapse/Snowflake, and delivered Power BI dashboards for pipeline SLAs and KPIs.

Delta Lake Apache Kafka Azure Data Factory Apache Airflow DBT Matillion Power BI HL7 FHIR

Senior Data Engineer

Bank of America

May 2017 - Jan 2019 (1 year 8 months)

Built large-scale batch and real-time data pipelines with Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Synapse Analytics to process transactional banking data. Developed fraud-detection streaming workflows with Kafka/Spark Streaming and hardened pipelines with automated anomaly detection, encryption/RBAC, and SOX-aligned governance while deploying via GitLab and Azure DevOps.

Azure Data Factory Azure Databricks Azure Synapse Kafka Pyspark Snowflake

Data Engineer

American Express

Nov 2014 - May 2017 (2 years 6 months)

Developed end-to-end Azure ETL/ELT pipelines with Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Database, and ADLS for structured and semi-structured enterprise data. Implemented data cleansing/validation frameworks and low-latency streaming with Spark and Python, and automated deployments using GitHub CI/CD and Docker.

Azure Data Factory Azure SQL Database Azure Databricks Pyspark Python SQL Informatica Power Exchange

Data Engineer

JPMorgan Chase

Aug 2012 - Oct 2014 (2 years 2 months)

Built automated SSIS ETL jobs to load data from flat files, Excel, and ODBC sources into SQL Server databases, along with supporting schemas, views, and T-SQL stored procedures. Implemented metadata-driven ETL and data-quality reconciliation/checks to improve reliability of reporting and SSRS dashboards.