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Thusani Khwanda

@thusanikhwanda

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I build secure, scalable AWS data platforms for financial services analytics.

South Africa

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What I'm looking for

I'm looking to build secure, scalable cloud data platforms and governed analytics products, particularly in financial services or large enterprises. I value work involving AWS architecture, DBT, big-data processing, automation, and decision-ready data.

I've designed and delivered AWS data platforms for Standard Bank, ABSA, BMW IT Hub, and Old Mutual, supporting large-scale financial and enterprise datasets. My work spans AWS ingestion architecture, DBT transformation layers, Glue and PySpark ETL pipelines, and secure data governance.

I'm focused on making data reliable, governed, and useful for analytics and decision-making through CI/CD, Terraform, SQL optimisation, Lake Formation, Athena, Redshift, and executive-ready QuickSight reporting.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

AWS Data Engineer

Current

Standard Bank (CIB)

Jan 2025 - Present (1 year 8 months)

Lead design of enterprise AWS ingestion and transformation architecture supporting multi-domain banking datasets. Implemented DBT transformation layers and engineered high-performance ETL pipelines using AWS Glue and PySpark.

AWS Glue S3 Athena Redshift Lake Formation Step Functions Cloudwatch Lambda EC2 DBT PySpark ETL Python SQL Terraform CI CD VPC RDS

AWS Data Engineer

ABSA (CIB)

Jan 2024 - Dec 2024 (11 months)

Delivered AWS-based ingestion pipelines handling structured and semi-structured enterprise datasets. Built orchestrated workflows using Step Functions and optimised Athena SQL workloads for improved performance and cost efficiency.

AWS S3 Step Functions Athena QuickSight SQL C#Data Pipelines Orchestration

AWS Data Engineer

BMW IT Hub

Aug 2022 - Jan 2024 (1 year 5 months)

Architected CI/CD pipelines improving deployment reliability across data services. Optimised complex SQL workloads across Oracle and PostgreSQL environments and configured AWS Glue jobs with secure RDS and VPC environments.

AWS Glue RDS VPC Terraform Python SQL PySpark CI CD Oracle PostgreSQL

Cloud Engineer

IOCO

Mar 2022 - Aug 2022 (5 months)

Built monthly reporting for MTN regions across Africa, tracking active users of the MTN app. Wrote BigQuery SQL on Google Cloud Platform to provide audience and targeting datasets to development teams.

Google Cloud Platform BigQuery SQL Reporting Data Analysis

AWS Data Engineer

Old Mutual

Mar 2021 - Mar 2022 (1 year)

Provisioned AWS Glue development endpoints and populated Glue Data Catalog via crawlers. Created business-driven views in Redshift and Athena using ANSI SQL and performed big data transformations using Python, PySpark, and SQL.