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Ștefan Iliescu

@tefaniliescu

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I build reliable real-time and batch data platforms for analytics, AI, and marketplace decision-making.

Romania

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What I'm looking for

I'm looking to build and lead maintainable, production-ready data platforms that deliver trusted real-time and batch datasets for analytics, machine learning, and business decision-making.

At Instacart, I lead development of a real-time grocery marketplace data platform, delivering CDC ingestion, event processing, warehouse-ready datasets, and ML-ready feature layers.

I've built and optimized Kafka, Spark, Airflow, and dbt pipelines that turn high-volume operational data into trusted analytics datasets. I improve reliability through monitoring, automated testing, validation checks, and faster production issue analysis.

Previously, I built cloud-native data platforms and AI-ready pipelines at FluX.AI, Genpact, and Celonis, spanning AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Kubernetes, and vector-search architectures. I also mentor engineers, review designs, and help teams maintain production-ready data infrastructure.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Lead Data Engineer

Current

Instacart

Feb 2023 - Present (3 years 7 months)

Led development of a real-time grocery marketplace data platform, supporting CDC ingestion, event processing, and warehouse-ready data delivery at scale. Built and optimized Kafka-, Spark-, and Airflow-based pipelines to transform high-volume operational data into trusted analytics datasets.

Python SQL Apache Spark Kafka Airflow Databricks Snowflake AWS DBT Data Modeling Data Quality CDC ETL ELT Monitoring Testing Automation Technical Leadership

Senior Data Engineer

FluX.AI

Jun 2021 - Feb 2023 (1 year 8 months)

Designed and developed scalable data engineering platforms supporting AI-powered hardware design workflows, managing complex engineering datasets including PCB designs, component libraries, simulation results, and real-time collaboration data. Built advanced ETL/ELT pipelines and architected cloud-native data lake and warehouse solutions.

Python SQL Apache Spark S3 Snowflake BigQuery Azure Data Lake Databricks Kafka Spark Streaming Airflow Kubernetes Docker CI CD PostgreSQL Pgvector RAG Feature Engineering Generative AI

Data Engineer

Genpact

Aug 2018 - Jun 2021 (2 years 10 months)

Developed and maintained scalable ETL/ELT data pipelines using Python, SQL, Apache Spark, and Apache Airflow to integrate enterprise data from finance, healthcare, insurance, supply chain, and customer operations systems. Designed and optimized cloud-based data platforms and implemented big data processing solutions.

Python SQL Apache Spark Airflow AWS Azure GCP Snowflake BigQuery Databricks Kafka ETL ELT Data Governance Data Quality CI CD Docker Kubernetes Lang Chain LlamaIndex PostgreSQL Pgvector RAG Feature Engineering

Software Engineer (Data Infrastructure)

Celonis

Sep 2015 - Aug 2018 (2 years 11 months)

Engineered data infrastructure components for processing high-volume event data, including ingestion pipelines, transformation workflows, and data quality validation services. Implemented scalable backend solutions with Python, SQL, Kafka, Spark, and Airflow.