Dinesh Pohane

About Dinesh Pohane

Lead Data Engineer | Snowflake, DBT, Apache Iceberg Architect, Redshift, AWS, Airflow/AstronomerWith 15+ years of experience in data engineering, I specialize in evolving traditional data warehousing into scalable, fault-tolerant Data Lakehouse architectures. My background spans the full data lifecycle—from designing ACID-compliant storage layers to orchestrating complex ELT pipelines that empower business stakeholders with self-service analytics.CORE TECHNICAL FOCUS Lakehouse Architecture: Designing open data lakehouse architectures that integrate Cloud Object Storage (S3) with compute engines like Snowflake to enable schema evolution and time-travel queries. Data Integrity & Modeling: Expert in Star Schema, SCD modeling, and ensuring transactional integrity for complex financial datasets (Wealth Management, CUSIP, demographics). Cloud Engineering: Deep expertise in the AWS ecosystem, including Glue, Lambda, and Redshift, ensuring high availability and secure data governance.MODERN DATA STACK I build and optimize pipelines using best-in-class tools: Storage & Compute: Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, AWS S3, Redshift. Transformation & Orchestration: dbt (Data Build Tool), Astronomer Airflow, Python, Spark. Observability & Quality: Metaplane, AWS CloudWatch. DevOps & AI: GitHub CI/CD, Cursor AI for workflow automation.RECENT HIGHLIGHTS Architecture Modernization: Spearheaded the design and implementation of an open Data Lakehouse using Apache Iceberg and Snowflake, enabling high-performance analytics on large-scale financial data. Complex Data Migration: Successfully led the post-acquisition integration of Avantax, unifying complex wealth management data into a central Snowflake warehouse. Efficiency & Automation: Accelerated development cycles by leveraging AI tools (Cursor AI) to automate Airflow DAG creation and optimize code, significantly reducing time-to-production. Performance Tuning: Orchestrated end-to-end pipelines using AWS Glue and dbt, achieving significant reductions in query run-times and cloud resource costs.

Experience

1. Sr Data Engineer

   Cetera Financial Group

   Aug 2022 — Present

   Designed and implemented an open data lakehouse architecture using Apache Iceberg tables integrated with Snowflake, enabling ACID-compliant transactions, schema evolution, time travel queries (e.g, Snowflake + external tools) on large-scale financial datasets stored in cloud object storage.• Spearheaded a critical data integration initiative post-Avantax acquisition, successfully migrating and unifying complex wealth management data—including customer demographics, account details, and CUSIP security identifiers—into Cetera\'s central Snowflake data warehouse.• Engineered and orchestrated end-to-end ETL/ELT pipelines using AWS Glue, Astronomer Airflow, and dbt, performing in-depth gap analysis on BRACS financial data to ensure the transactional integrity of the daily \"Asset Walk\" reporting system.• Drove significant improvements in data processing efficiency through targeted performance tuning of Snowflake queries and complex dbt models, reducing run times and optimizing resource consumption.• Accelerated development cycles and improved team productivity by leveraging Cursor AI to automate the creation of repetitive Airflow DAGs and implementing rigorous version control and CI/CD practices using GitHub.• Championed and enabled a self-service analytics framework by creating comprehensive model documentation and enhancing data lineage, empowering business stakeholders with direct access to reliable, high-quality financial data for reporting and analysis.

Education

• YC College of Engineering

  Bachelor's degree, Computer Science

  1989 — 1993

• Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

  Master's degree, Computer Information Systems

  1994 — 1996

Skills

• Amazon Redshift
• Hybrid Cloud
• Oracle 11g
• Cassandra
• Lambda
• Hive
• Sqoop
• Database Administration
• Greenplum
• Performance Tuning
• Integration
• Snowflake
• Google Big Query
• Data Warehousing
• Business Requirements
• Vertica
• Big Data
• Shell Scripting
• Extract, Transform, Load (Etl)
• Cloudera
• Informatica
• Unix Shell Scripting
• Amazon S3
• Sql
• Oracle
• Redshift
• Cloud Computing
• Cloud Architecture
• Google Cloud Platform
• Sdlc
• Apache Pig
• Solution Architecture
• Data Integration
• Amazon Rds
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Oracle Warehouse Builder
• Business Analysis
• Hortonworks
• Etl
• Data Quality