Open to opportunities

Safdar Iqbal

@safdariqbal1

Message

I am a Senior Big Data Solutions Architect delivering cloud-native, cost-efficient petabyte-scale data platforms.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek senior roles building cloud-native, petabyte-scale data platforms and real-time streaming solutions with strong governance, cross-functional leadership, and measurable cost and performance improvements.

I am an innovative, results-driven Data Engineering leader with over 10 years of experience architecting, developing, and optimizing high-performance, cloud-native data platforms. I specialize in building petabyte-scale pipelines and modern data lakehouse architectures across healthcare, finance, and SaaS.

I have designed multi-cloud platforms and real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark) processing 20B–25B+ events/day with sub-second latency, and implemented cost-optimized ETL orchestration (Airflow, dbt) that reduced pipeline costs by 40% and improved data processing speeds by over 80%. I enforce data governance and compliance (HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR) and have mentored engineering teams to increase delivery speed and reduce defects.

I combine strong cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Databricks expertise with MLOps and production ML model serving to accelerate analytics and decision-making. I seek to deliver scalable, secure, and cost-effective data platforms that enable fast, data-driven outcomes.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Big Data Solutions Architect

Current

CloudNova Technologies

Jan 2021 - Present (5 years 5 months)

Architected multi-cloud data platforms integrating AWS Redshift, GCP BigQuery, and Azure Synapse, processing 25B+ daily events with 99.9% uptime; implemented Airflow/dbt cost optimizations reducing pipeline costs by 40% and mentored a 12-member team to increase delivery speed by 30%.

AWS GCP Azure Apache Kafka Apache Flink Apache Spark Airflow DBT Databricks

Big Data Engineer

DataWave Solutions

Jan 2016 - Jan 2021 (5 years)

Designed and maintained multi-terabyte ETL/ELT pipelines with Airflow, dbt, Fivetran, and Spark, reducing processing times from 4 hours to 20 minutes and cutting storage costs by 25% via a Spark + Delta Lake S3 lakehouse; built real-time ingestion with Kafka and Kinesis to reduce data latency by 90%.

Airflow DBT Apache Spark Apache Kafka Snowflake Amazon Redshift Delta Lake Fivetran Great Expectations

Data Engineer

Insight Analytics

Jan 2013 - Jan 2016 (3 years)

Built and maintained Talend and Informatica ETL workflows for high-volume financial datasets, improving reporting speed by 40% and reducing load times by 60% through incremental loading and SQL performance tuning.

Talend Informatica SQL ETL AWS Glue Amazon S3 Performance Tuning