Christopher Ackerman

About Christopher Ackerman

Compelling and fast, life-long learner with the ability in adapting to new technology and roles; equally successful in both team and self-directed settings, experience in the collaboration of team members; proficient in a range of computer systems, tools, and languages. Gratifying knowledge with multi facet environments including team leadership, working in Security oriented environments, maintaining, and formulating data visualizations, SQL Querying, data engineering, database design & data architecture.Highly skilled data engineer with 5 years of experience designing and implementing data pipelines, managing big data systems and providing data solutions to business problems. With a strong background in programming languages such as Python and SQL, and experience with big data technologies such as Hadoop, and Spark, with a proven track record of success in designing, building and maintaining large-scale data systems. They have a strong understanding of data warehousing principles and data modeling and able to design and implement efficient and robust data pipelines.

Experience

1. Data Engineer

   Accel Entertainment

   Nov 2023 — Present · Chicago, IL, US

   Lead a phased modernization of the company’s data platform supporting a ~1,700-employee organization, transitioning Azure Data Factory v2 and Azure SQL Data Warehouse workloads to Microsoft Fabric. Own end-to-end design, development, and optimization of ETL/ELT pipelines, dimensional modeling, and orchestration strategy.• Designed reusable, parameterized ingestion and transformation frameworks to enable scalable onboarding of complex data sources while maintaining performance, reliability, and integrity. Applied AI-assisted development workflows and code-generation tools to accelerate solution design, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, optimize SQL and Spark performance, and streamline troubleshooting.• Partnered with analytics and AI teams to deliver curated, production-ready datasets, providing domain context and lineage insights to support model development. Advised on data structure, governance, and infrastructure to ensure secure, scalable AI integration. Enforced SOX-compliant governance and security standards across Azure SQL and cloud services, including CI/CD through GitHub Actions, Azure Key Vault management, and controlled environment promotion. Led monitoring, performance tuning, and reliability improvements while translating architectural tradeoffs into business-aligned guidance for executives.

Education

• Western Governors University

  Bachelor of Applied Science - BASc, Data Management/ Data Analytics

• Illinois Central College

  Associate of Science - AS, Network and System Administration/Administrator

• Western Governors University

  Master of Science - MS, Data Engineering / Data Analytics

• Richwoods High School

  High School Diploma, General Studies