Senior Data / AI Engineer · Data Team Lead

I build data platforms
leadership can trust.

I'm a data engineer who turns messy, high-volume enterprise data into real-time, governed analytics — then builds AI on top of the warehouse: LLM-powered natural-language querying, agents, and MCP. Modern stack: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Power BI. Pipelines that are cheap to run, models that are correct, access that's provable.

Get in touch ↓ Download Resume See my work ↓

📍 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia•DAMA CDMP Certified

Ticketing Comp API Snow-flake dbt Power BI ⚙ MWAA · Airflow
My real platform — ingest → Snowflake medallion (RAW→STG→DH→MART) → dbt → Power BI.
6 yrs
Data engineering experience
10×
Lower ingestion cost, EDP refactor
↓ cheaper compute
100+
PII columns masked (PDPL / NDMO)
4-layer
Medallion warehouse, RAW→MART

01 About

I'm a data engineer and team lead. I help build and run the Enterprise Data Platform at Esports World Cup Foundation — a Snowflake-based warehouse that turns ticketing, attendance, viewership, and competition data into the numbers leadership actually makes decisions on.

My work sits across three areas: platform architecture (medallion warehouse design, dimensional modelling, orchestration), governance & security (RBAC, data residency and PDPL compliance, access control, PII masking), and enabling people (self-service analytics, natural-language querying, onboarding engineers onto the platform). I care about pipelines that are cheap to run, models that are correct, and access that is provable.

Increasingly my work is architecture, not just engineering — assessment, target-state design, technology selection against constraints, and verifying that what gets delivered matches what was designed. See how I architect →

02 Data stack

Warehouse & Compute

  • Snowflake
  • RBAC
  • Masking Policies
  • Resource Monitors
  • Snowpark
  • ACCOUNT_USAGE

Databases & Storage

  • SQL Server
  • Teradata
  • SingleStore
  • Amazon S3

ETL & Ingestion

  • Informatica PowerCenter
  • SSIS
  • Talend
  • NDJSON → COPY → MERGE

Transformation

  • dbt
  • Incremental Models
  • Surrogate Keys
  • Snapshots
  • FUTURE grants
  • SQL

Orchestration

  • Airflow (AWS MWAA)
  • Custom Operators
  • Dynamic DAGs
  • Backfills
  • Alerting

Modelling

  • Kimball
  • Star Schemas
  • Slowly Changing Dims
  • Medallion Architecture

BI & Consumption

  • Power BI
  • Semantic Models
  • Workspace Governance
  • NLQ

Governance & Quality

  • OpenMetadata
  • Great Expectations
  • Talend DQ
  • Data Profiling
  • Data Contracts
  • PII Masking
  • PDPL / NDMO

Cloud & Infra

  • AWS (MWAA, S3, IAM)
  • SSO / SAML
  • Network Policies
  • Key-pair Auth

Languages & Tooling

  • SQL
  • Python
  • Git / GitHub
  • CI/CD
  • Claude Code

AI Engineering

  • Anthropic API
  • Agent Design
  • MCP Servers
  • LLM-over-Warehouse
  • Snowflake Cortex
  • Model Selection & Evaluation
  • Self-Hosted Inference
  • Quantization & KV-Cache

03 Experience

  1. May 2026 — PresentTeam Lead

    Senior Data / AI Engineer · Team Lead

    Esports World Cup Foundation · Riyadh

    • Platform Architecture: Architected an end-to-end enterprise data platform on Snowflake using a medallion pattern, defining the layering standards.
    • AI Agent: Built Talk With Data — an AI agent with governed access to the warehouse, answering business questions in plain language without SQL.
    • AI Data Feed: Built reverse-ETL from warehouse marts into an in-house AI application, feeding the model that builds personalised plans for event visitors.
    • Access & Security: Designed the Snowflake access model — least-privilege roles for external BI partners and for the AI agents querying the warehouse — and set the service-account security standard.
    • Pipeline Engineering: Built and operate 20+ production pipelines on managed Airflow (AWS MWAA) — standardized DAG patterns, secrets injection, failure alerting (SNS), containerized task execution on ECS Fargate and DEV/PROD isolation.
    • Cross-Border Integration: Integrated complex international data sources — China- and Europe-based providers — with cross-border ingestion satisfying our PDPL governance framework and each source's local regulations (China PIPL / data localization, EU GDPR).
    • Technical Leadership: Bridged global data owners, vendors and internal stakeholders — ran data-discovery sessions with providers across multiple regions, and hold a 50+ source catalog against live pipeline evidence.
    • Orchestration Migration: Migrated a tournament pipeline off self-managed Airflow to managed orchestration, with a dbt staging layer, incremental loads and watermarking.
    • Analytics Engineering: Modeled star-schema marts in dbt with tests, docs and CI/CD.
    • Cost Optimization: Eliminated idle compute spend on Snowflake by tuning warehouse auto-suspend, so the warehouse stops billing the moment queries stop.
  2. Sep 2023 — May 2026Team Lead

    Data Engineering Team Lead / Architecture

    STC Channels · Riyadh

    • Designed & governed a scalable Data Lakehouse (Alibaba OSS, Iceberg, Dagster) — −50% data latency, enabling real-time analytics.
    • Drove the BI department to 100% NDMO compliance with robust data governance frameworks.
    • Migrated legacy pipelines (SSIS, SQL Server) to cloud-native architecture with zero reporting disruption.
    • Resolved complex production issues across a hybrid Alibaba Cloud + on-prem landscape; mentored junior engineers.
  3. Mar 2023 — Sep 2023

    Data Engineer

    Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA)

    • Designed, developed & deployed ETL pipelines in Informatica PowerCenter for stakeholders and data scientists.
    • Owned full-lifecycle data integration — mappings, workflows, data flows.
    • Ensured data accuracy and SLA compliance; resolved discrepancies and performance issues.
  4. Dec 2020 — 2023

    ETL & BI Developer

    ETEC — Education & Training Evaluation Commission · via Master Works

    • Delivered a centralized national-education data warehouse powering executive BI dashboards.
    • +40% report accuracy via robust data-integrity & error-handling logic in ETL.
    • Led extraction from diverse sources (SQL, flat files) and built custom SSRS reports.
  5. Earlier · Master Works

    ETL & BI Developer

    MCIT · King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital

    • Designed & maintained DBMS: data modeling, cleansing, transformation, validation.
    • Built SSIS ETL jobs into the data warehouse; authored ETL specs and Tableau dashboards for leadership.
  6. Poland

    iOS Developer

    Transporter Bus Centrum · Gdańsk, Poland

    • Built networked iOS apps in Swift — REST (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE), Codable JSON, MVC, GCD, auth.

04 Selected projects

Snowflake · dbt · MWAA · Power BI

Enterprise Data Platform (EDP)

The foundation's central warehouse. A four-layer medallion architecture with orchestrated ingestion from ticketing, attendance, competition & viewership sources, modelled into governed marts for BI.

Impact Single source of truth for event reporting; ingestion costs cut by an order of magnitude on refactored pipelines.

Snowflake · MCP · LLM

Talk With Data — Natural-Language Analytics

A governed natural-language interface to the warehouse. Non-technical users ask questions in plain language inside an approval workflow that keeps access auditable and compliant with in-Kingdom residency.

Impact Removed the analyst bottleneck for routine questions; adopted after executive review.

Side project · LLM · Quantization

Multi-Model LLM Inference Service

A self-hosted inference service running several open-weight models behind one interface, with token streaming and per-session state so conversations hold context across turns.

Impact 70 tok/s on constrained hardware, and 2.5× throughput after quantization and KV-cache tuning.

Snowflake · dbt · Kimball

Competition Data Warehouse

Full dimensional model for tournament structure — series, matches, phases, groups — built against a live, evolving upstream API. Absorbed breaking schema changes mid-season without downstream disruption.

Snowflake · Python · Airflow

Ingestion Cost Optimization

Audited warehouse credit consumption via ACCOUNT_USAGE, traced idle compute to per-row inserts, and rebuilt loaders on a bulk staging pattern.

Impact Order-of-magnitude recurring savings, plus faster load times.

05 Achievements & education

Certification

DAMA CDMP

Certified Data Management Professional — DAMA International.

Recognition · 2024

NDMO Project Appreciation

Recognized by STC executive leadership for 99% NDMO compliance.

Award · 2023

Performance Excellence

Led design & delivery of a full-scale ETEC Data Warehouse — Master Works.

Education

BSc Computer Science

Al-Imam Mohammad bin Saud University, 2020 · English Diploma, British Council.

Arabic — Native English — Full Professional Polish — Elementary

06 Get in touch

Open to senior data engineering, data platform, and architecture conversations. Let's talk.

✉ ss.mekhlafi@gmail.com in · LinkedIn ⌥ GitHub