Ajinkya Bhat

Product Engineer

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates11 yrs 3 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

15+ years in data engineering leadership.
Expert in cloud-native architectures and cost optimization.
Proven track record in mentoring future engineering leaders.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Engineering Leader with expertise in Music, Transportation, and Healthcare sectors.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Data EngineeringCloud ArchitectureCost SavingsData GovernanceHealthcare

Other Skills

Distributed Systems DesignKubernetesPythonScalaAmazon Web Services (AWS)Apache SparkMentoringStrategic PlanningtrinoProblem SolvingLeadershipAmazon RedshiftlookerAWSSpark

About

Seasoned Data Engineering Leader with 15+ years of turning complex problems into scalable, intelligent solutions. I build data platforms that don’t just scale… they save money, boost performance, and make businesses smarter. 💡 Proven track record in engineering leadership, distributed systems design, and cloud architecture from greenfield builds to scaling platforms serving millions. I deliver impact through people, data, and technology, bringing both technical depth and strategic vision. ⚡ Superpowers -- Leading high-performance teams and mentoring engineers into future leaders. -- Designing cloud-native, cost-savvy architectures and future-proof platforms. -- Thriving on high-stakes challenges with an entrepreneurial mindset while always keeping business impact front and center. 🚀 Industries I have Driven Impact In: 🎵 Music & Video Streaming - Anghami & OSN+ 🚖 Transportation & Ride Hailing - Careem & Uber 💰 Finance & Fintech - Careem Pay 👥 HR & People Analytics - Cisco 💊 Medical & Healthcare - Cardinal Health 🌟 Beyond Data ✈️ Travel - Explored 150 countries (and counting) 🥗 Food enthusiast - Forever chasing new vegetarian flavors 📚 Lifelong learner - From Deep tech to Geography & History 🎮 Casual gamer & Anime fan 🏏 Sports enthusiast - Cricket, Badminton, Ping Pong & adventure outdoors Always open to conversations in technology, product, traveling or pushing the frontier of what data can do. ajinkya.bhat@gmail.com

Experience

11 yrs 3 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 9 mos

Average Tenure

4 yrs 5 mos

Current Experience

Anghami

2 roles

Principal Data Engineer

Promoted

Mar 2026 – Present · 2 mos

Leading Data Engineering Platform and Infrastructure at Arab world's biggest music leader
Offer architectural expertise and direction to development teams, ensuring that data engineering initiatives align with best practices for data volume management, KPIs, and analytics.

Data EngineeringCloud ArchitectureDistributed Systems Design

Data Engineering Lead

Dec 2021 – Mar 2026 · 4 yrs 3 mos

Architect and optimize data processing frameworks, ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness across Spark, Trino, and Redshift.
Develop a cost spike detection framework for AWS services, performing real-time calculations to trigger alerts and drive actionable steps—helping eliminate redundant services, optimize resource usage, and significantly cut cloud costs.
Standardize and streamline internal Spark frameworks, enabling teams to run efficient, error-free, and high-performance ETL workflows.
Migrate and modernize data workloads by transitioning legacy Redshift and PHP-based jobs to Spark and Trino, improving performance and reducing AWS costs.
Deploy and manage Kubernetes using Terraform, enhancing performance and scalability while ensuring robust infrastructure automation.
Optimize cloud costs by refining data processing strategies, deprecating inefficient pipelines, and leveraging serverless and distributed computing where applicable.
Enhance reliability by implementing best practices in data orchestration, monitoring, and fault-tolerant execution to support large-scale data workloads.

KubernetesPythonScalaAmazon Web Services (AWS)Apache SparkData Engineering+9

Careem

Senior Data Engineer

Jun 2017 – Dec 2021 · 4 yrs 6 mos · Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Developed ETL & integrated data pipelines to move data between source systems to and from AWS S3, Redshift, RDS, DynamoDB using Python, Scala, Spark and Spark Streaming, AWS Lambda, SQS, Kinesis, Shell scripting, AWS Glue jobs, AWS DMS (Database Migration Service)
Pipelines with 3rd party API Ads Integrations to ingest data in lake in batch or Realtime from Google Cloud Platform, FB ads, Snapchat, Twitter and various networks
Kafka and Zookeeper IAC. Utilized Kafka to capture and process real time streaming data from RDS binlogs to create data lake in S3. Made use of Confluent Kafka, Maxwell connectors. Used Prometheus & Grafana & Slack for Alerts & Monitoring
Developed Airflow IAC using ECS, ECR, Fargate services via Cloudformation to create various pipelines to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows for automation of data pipelines. Explored DAG's, their dependencies and logs to optimize workflow management
Managed Amazon Web Services infrastructure by writing Ansible playbooks to execute bunch of scripts for creation of new EC2 instances, installation & configuration of various packages. Focus was to migrate all the existing solutions & make them stateless.
Wrote Immutable Infrastructure as a Service scripts using technologies: Terraform, Ansible & Packer
Worked in Setting up, Scaling & Benchmarking Presto & Zeppelin Clusters in collaboration with data science team with emphasis on optimization of queries used for daily reporting by growth teams and saving costs by scaling the clusters accordingly

Apache SparkPrestoScalaAirflowApache KafkaApache Spark Streaming+3

Cisco

Hadoop Lead Developer

Aug 2015 – Apr 2017 · 1 yr 8 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Developed data integration process with Data Architect by establishing specifications, data warehouse schema, transformations and thereby delivered end product to the customers.
Designed, tested and implemented the required information acquisition and management solutions within the Data Warehouse
Optimized the performance of data integration processes by automating the workflow by creating new designs and standards in Hadoop Mapr distribution
Involved in developing UDFs for the needed functionality that is not out of the box available from Hive
Worked on automating shell script using cron job to encrypt and backup files to Amazon S3 bucket
Created and Monitored the Tidal jobs to schedule workflows in Integration and Production environment.

Data EngineeringHadoopData GovernanceData WarehousingShell ScriptingMapReduce+1

Cardinal health

Hadoop Application Engineer

Nov 2014 – Jul 2015 · 8 mos · Columbus, Ohio Area

Created data ingestion and transformation process to load the data from MySql, Oracle and Teradata database into the Hortonworks distribution Hadoop platform for use in advanced analytics models and presentation of results for the Healthcare Market Initiative project.
Developed and optimized scripts for Change Data Capture and delta record processing between newly arrived data and already existing data in HDFS by automating them on a daily scale using Cron jobs.
Responsible for developing data pipeline using Sqoop to extract the data and store in HDFS
Analyzed, prioritized, fixed and documented potential bug fixes
Provided technical consulting and advice during the analysis and design phases of projects, so that the data designs being deployed are aligned to Architecture standards

DatabasesChange Data CaptureHealthcareHadoopBig DataAnalytics+4

Hexagrid technologies

Big Data Intern

Jul 2014 – Sep 2014 · 2 mos · Greater St. Louis Area

Involved in developing solutions for POC/Short term projects. The projects are mostly based on data processing from IOT devices using distributed processing techniques by achieving 99.9% availability.
Developed shell scripts to take backup & perform various tasks on Ubuntu Linux OS & automated on a recurring basis
Successfully installed & setup Hive, Pig & other apache tools on Cloudera Hadoop distribution
Monitored Hadoop cluster using tools like Nagios, Ganglia and Cloudera Manager

LinuxDevOpsBig DataAnalyticsInternet of Things (IoT)Shell Scripting

Startup palm beach

Web Developer/Designer Intern

Apr 2014 – Jun 2014 · 2 mos · West Palm Beach, Florida Area

Developed web presence for Startup by creating user-friendly Blog and App that will allow company's employees to make updates to the site and App landing page
Designed and customized Wordpress site using PHP, HTML and CSS adding and configuring associated plugins/widgets

Web DevelopmentPHPWeb ApplicationsAnalyticsStartup Development