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Phurba Sherpa

@phurbasherpa

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Senior Data Engineer specializing in cloud-native lakehouse platforms and cost-optimized analytics.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek a role building scalable, governed cloud data platforms (GCP/AWS/Azure), focusing on reliability, cost optimization, and close partnership with Data Science and compliance teams.

I am a Senior Data Engineer with 7+ years delivering and modernizing enterprise data platforms across healthcare and financial services, focusing on scalable, fault-tolerant batch and streaming pipelines. I lead cloud migrations and Lakehouse redesigns that improved performance and reduced costs.

My work has produced measurable outcomes — including over $250K in annual cost savings through warehouse and workload optimization, 25% compute reduction at UnitedHealth, and significant decreases in pipeline incidents via schema enforcement and automated quality checks. I collaborate closely with Data Science, security, compliance, and DevOps to deliver audit-ready, governed datasets for critical analytics.

I bring strong technical leadership, mentoring experience, and hands-on expertise across GCP, AWS, and Azure, with certifications in Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer, AWS Data Analytics Specialty, and SnowPro Advanced. I prioritize reliability, observability, and cost efficiency while enabling rapid model development and regulatory compliance.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Data Engineer

Current

UnitedHealth

Apr 2023 - Present (2 years 10 months)

Led migration of analytics pipelines from AWS to GCP, refactored Redshift workloads and Spark clusters to reduce compute by 25% and delivered ~$200K annual cost savings while improving pipeline reliability and reducing incidents by 40%.

BigQuery Cloud Storage Pub Sub Apache Spark Pyspark SQL Terraform

Data Engineer

Liberty Mutual Insurance

Oct 2021 - Apr 2023 (1 year 6 months)

Developed and optimized AWS-based pipelines (Redshift, S3, Glue), improving processing efficiency by 30%, implementing real-time solutions with Lambda/Kinesis and reducing costs and deployment times via CI/CD and Terraform.

Redshift S3 Glue AWS Lambda Kinesis Python SQL Terraform CI CD

Data Engineer

MetLife

Mar 2019 - Oct 2021 (2 years 7 months)

Built and optimized Azure Data Factory and Synapse pipelines and Databricks ETL, improving processing efficiency by 35% and leveraging Snowflake to boost query performance by 30% and reduce storage costs by 25%.