Certainly! Here’s a well-articulated example based on your experience that highlights problem-solving through skills and leadership:
One notable example from my time at Pratt & Whitney involved a critical challenge during the migration of the enterprise data lake from Cloudera to Databricks on AWS. The organization was facing increasing costs, performance limitations, and governance gaps within the existing on-premise setup. The legacy system had grown complex over time, with inconsistent data pipelines, limited metadata visibility, and long processing times that impacted downstream analytics and decision-making.
To address this, I led a cross-functional team of data engineers, analysts, and architects through a full-scale cloud migration initiative. I started by conducting a comprehensive assessment of the existing data landscape—cataloging over 300 data assets, evaluating pipeline dependencies, and identifying performance bottlenecks. I then developed a phased migration strategy, balancing lift-and-shift for stable assets and replatforming critical workloads that required modernization.
Using my expertise in Apache Spark, Airflow, and cloud-native tooling like AWS DMS and Databricks Delta Lake, we rebuilt and optimized key ETL pipelines. This not only improved data refresh rates by over 40%, but also reduced processing costs through compute optimization and auto-scaling features.
To strengthen governance and trust in data, I introduced a data classification and quality framework, and collaborated with stakeholders to implement data stewardship roles and usage policies. This initiative restored confidence in analytics outputs and enabled self-service reporting across several business units.
The outcome was a scalable, governed, and cost-efficient data platform that significantly enhanced operational agility and decision-making across the organization. This project reinforced the importance of combining technical depth, strategic planning, and stakeholder alignment to solve high-impact enterprise challenges.
Let me know if you want this tailored to a specific job description or shortened for a STAR-format interview response.