Karthikeyan Kumaran
Engineering Leader in Data Engineering | Scaled from Junior to Manager | Data Platforms, Pipelines & Cloud Architectures
- Role
- Engineering Manager - Data Engineering at Discover
- Location
- Chicago, IL, US
- LinkedIn followers
- 500 followers
About Karthikeyan Kumaran
With over 12 years of progressive experience in data engineering, I’ve evolved from a Junior Data Engineer to leading high-performing teams as an Engineering Manager. I bring deep expertise in building scalable, resilient data platforms and cloud-native architectures across AWS and GCP, supporting advanced analytics, machine learning, and real-time decision systems.I’ve led initiatives migrating on-prem workloads to the cloud (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), modernized data lakes and ETL pipelines using PySpark, Airflow, and dbt, and implemented DataOps practices including CI/CD, observability, and testing frameworks like Great Expectations. Known for combining hands-on technical skills with people leadership, I foster innovation, mentor data engineers, and bridge cross-functional collaboration between engineering, product, and analytics teams.
Experience
Engineering Manager - Data Engineering
Mar 2022 — Present · Chicago, IL, US
Led the data engineering team responsible for building and managing the enterprise data platform supporting credit card transaction processing, rewards computation, fraud detection, and customer behavior analytics. Drove initiatives around data modernization, governance, and ML readiness to support business intelligence, regulatory compliance, and real-time credit risk scoring.Achievements. Reduced data latency from 8 hours to under 30 minutes by re-architecting transaction processing pipelines using Kafka and Spark. Delivered analytics platform supporting $1B+ in annual rewards processing with 99.95% availability. Enabled fraud detection model deployment to production by streamlining feature store integration, reducing model training cycle by 40%. Achieved zero critical incidents for 4 consecutive quarters by implementing robust monitoring, alerting, and disaster recovery practices. Spearheaded cloud migration project that reduced infrastructure costs by 35% while increasing throughput and storage capacity. Promoted a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing, leading to a 25% increase in team’s internal certification completions. Partnered with finance and risk to build regulatory reporting dashboards used in quarterly board reviews and compliance audits.
Education
SRM IST Chennai
Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science
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