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Matiwos Desalegn

@matiwosdesalegn

Senior Data Engineer at Kifiya Financial Technology, running 200+ hourly CDC replications and building governed lakehouse platforms.

Ethiopia

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm open to Data Architect and Senior Data Engineer roles, remotely with teams in Europe or in senior roles in Africa. I'm also open to selected consulting in data architecture, governance, and engineering.

At Kifiya Financial Technology PLC, I work on the data platform for digital lending. I run 200+ tables in hourly CDC replication and built a Gold reporting masterview served to BI through Apache Superset.

I joined Kifiya while its data platform was still being built. I stood up its first lakehouse and Redshift warehouse, moved orchestration to Airflow on EKS, and built an ML feature store and credit decision API serving 50+ engineered features with under 200ms p95 latency.

Before Kifiya, I worked as a Software Engineer - Associate Technology Professional at HST, designing the frontend for HST-Payroll and integrating it with REST APIs. My independent work includes research on Amharic small language models and projects in RAG and handwritten Ethiopic OCR.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

Kifiya Financial Technology PLC

Jul 2026 - Present (3 months)

Data platform work for digital lending: near real-time replication and Gold reporting models for a smart mobility partner, the lakehouse governance layer, and the deployment path for dbt. I still run the orchestration and feature pipelines I built as a Data Engineer.
• Run 200+ tables in hourly CDC replication for a smart mobility partner, with exactly-once loads, using OLake, Apache Iceberg, dbt

Data Engineer

Kifiya Financial Technology PLC

Oct 2024 - Jun 2026 (1 year 8 months)

I joined while the data platform was still being built. I stood up its first lakehouse, the Redshift warehouse and the ML feature store for multiple institutional partners, moved orchestration to Airflow on EKS, and built GenAI services on top.
• Built the company's first lakehouse on Amazon S3 with Athena and the Glue Data Catalog: 300+ tables cataloged in the first company lakehouse, from multip

Software Engineer - Associate Technology Professional

HST

Nov 2023 - Oct 2024 (11 months)

Frontend developer on a SaaS HR and payroll product (HST-Payroll), working with the backend team on the APIs behind it.
• Designed and built the frontend of the company's SaaS HR and payroll product.
• Worked with the backend team to integrate the frontend with their REST APIs.
• Worked in a small startup team building software for HR operations.

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

DataCamp

Associate Data Engineer in Snowflake

Jul 2026

DataCamp

Associate Data Engineer in Databricks

Sep 2026

Data Engineering Pipeline Management with Apache Airflow

Feb 2026

DataCamp

Associate Data Engineer in SQL

Jul 2026

Data Engineering Foundations

Jan 2026

Advanced NoSQL for Data Science

Feb 2026

Apache Airflow Essential Training

Feb 2026

Collaboration Principles and Process

Feb 2026

Introduction to Amazon Redshift: Data Management Essentials

Jan 2026

Problem-Solving Strategies for Data Engineers

Feb 2026

PySpark Essential Training: Introduction to Building Data Pipelines

Feb 2026

Tech Career Skills: Effective Technical Communication

Feb 2026

Advanced SQL Project: Design and Manage a Database

Jan 2026

Agentic AI Design Patterns for GenAI and Predictive AI

Jan 2026

Learning Apache Airflow

Jan 2026

Designing Highly Scalable and Highly Available SQL Databases

Jan 2026

Enterprise Architecture in Practice

Jan 2026

Anthropic

Claude Code in Action

Jul 2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS Educate Machine Learning Foundations

Jun 2025

Udacity

Introducing Generative AI with AWS

Jun 2025

10 Academy

Certificate of Completion, Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Financial Analysis.

2024 - 2024

Completed a rigorous 12-week program covering end-t-end data science, machine learning, and data engineering workflows - from data collection and modeling to production deployment.

Core Projects
• Data Analysis & Visualization - statistical methods with Matplotib and Seaborn
• NLP - sentiment analysis and topic modeling
• Deep Learning - LSTM-based predictive modes
• Regression & Classification -