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Saeed Almekhlfi

Senior Data / AI Engineer

Senior Data / AI Engineer and Team Lead with 6 years of experience building scalable data platforms on the modern data stack. Skilled in aligning business needs with modern data architectures. Passionate about driving value through Data & AI solutions.

[email protected]
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
linkedin.com/in/saeed-almekhlafi

Work Experience

Senior Data / AI Engineer · Team Lead
Esports World Cup Foundation
05/2026 - Present
Achievements/Tasks
  • Platform Architecture: Architected an end-to-end enterprise data platform on Snowflake using a medallion pattern, defining the layering standards.
  • AI Agent: Built Talk With Data — an AI agent with governed access to the warehouse, answering business questions in plain language without SQL.
  • AI Data Feed: Built reverse-ETL from warehouse marts into an in-house AI application, feeding the model that builds personalised plans for event visitors.
  • Access & Security: Designed the Snowflake access model — least-privilege roles for external BI partners and for the AI agents querying the warehouse — and set the service-account security standard.
  • Pipeline Engineering: Built and operate 20+ production pipelines on managed Airflow (AWS MWAA) — standardized DAG patterns, secrets injection, failure alerting (SNS), containerized task execution on ECS Fargate and DEV/PROD isolation.
  • Cross-Border Integration: Integrated complex international data sources — China- and Europe-based providers — with cross-border ingestion satisfying our PDPL governance framework and each source's local regulations (China PIPL / data localization, EU GDPR).
  • Technical Leadership: Bridged global data owners, vendors and internal stakeholders — ran data-discovery sessions with providers across multiple regions, and hold a 50+ source catalog against live pipeline evidence.
  • Orchestration Migration: Migrated a tournament pipeline off self-managed Airflow to managed orchestration, with a dbt staging layer, incremental loads and watermarking.
  • Analytics Engineering: Modeled star-schema marts in dbt with tests, docs and CI/CD.
  • Cost Optimization: Eliminated idle compute spend on Snowflake by tuning warehouse auto-suspend, so the warehouse stops billing the moment queries stop.
Data Engineering Team Lead / Architecture
STC Channels
09/2023 - 05/2026
Achievements/Tasks
  • Architectural Leadership: Designed and governed a scalable Data Lakehouse platform (Alibaba OSS, Iceberg, Dagster) reducing data latency by 50% and enabling real-time analytics.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally with strategy and BI stakeholders to translate high-level business needs into actionable technical architecture.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Achieved 100% compliance with NDMO standards by spearheading regulatory readiness initiatives and implementing robust data governance frameworks across the BI department.
  • Operational Excellence: Delivered hands-on resolution of complex production issues across a hybrid landscape (Alibaba Cloud, on-premises), ensuring high availability and optimized resource consumption.
  • Modernization Strategy: Managed the strategic migration of legacy data pipelines (SSIS, SQL Server) into modern cloud-native architectures without disrupting critical business reporting.
  • Mentored and provided technical guidance to junior data engineers, fostering a culture of learning and growth within the team.
Data Engineer
(ZATCA) Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority
03/2023 - 09/2023
Achievements/Tasks
  • Designed, developed and deployed ETL pipelines using Informatica PowerCenter, ensuring the availability of accurate and timely data for business stakeholders and data scientists.
  • Engaged in the full lifecycle development of data integration tasks, mappings, workflows and data flows using Informatica PowerCenter.
  • Troubleshot and resolved data discrepancies and system performance issues, ensuring the integrity and reliability of the data.
  • Ensured data accuracy and SLA compliance by building and optimizing ETL pipelines in Informatica PowerCenter.
ETL & BI Developer
Education & Training Evaluation Commission (ETEC) / Master Works
12/2020 - 03/2023
Achievements/Tasks
  • Delivered a centralized data warehouse platform powering national education insights, automating ETL pipelines and building dynamic BI dashboards used by executive leadership.
  • Led complex data extraction initiatives, pulling data from diverse source systems such as SQL databases, flat files and data repositories.
  • Gathered requirements and business-process knowledge in order to transform the data; identified and recommended process improvements to reduce inefficiencies and improve accuracy.
  • Designed and developed custom BI reports using Microsoft SQL Reporting Services.
  • Improved report accuracy by 40% by implementing robust data-integrity and error-handling logic into ETL processes.
ETL & BI Developer
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) / Master Works
Achievements/Tasks
  • Design and maintenance of the Database Management System (DBMS), including data modeling, extraction, cleansing, aggregation, transformation and validation to ensure accuracy and consistency.
  • Used SSIS to develop jobs for extracting, cleaning, transforming and loading data into the data warehouse.
ETL & BI Developer
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital / Master Works
Achievements/Tasks
  • Extensively involved in requirements gathering and writing ETL specifications.
  • Tableau development — created and designed dashboards for top management.
(Car rental near me) iOS Developer
Transporter Bus Centrum Dealer Samochodów Użytkowych Maciej Zimiński
Gdańsk, Poland
Achievements/Tasks
  • Network requests (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) against a web service; JSON parsing with Codable (Decodable, Encodable).
  • MVC pattern with a networking layer for cleaner code; GCD and queues; authenticated requests.

Skills

Warehouse & Transform

SnowflakedbtAdvanced SQLSnowparkData ModelingMedallion ArchitectureStar Schemas

Orchestration & Cloud

Airflow (AWS MWAA)ECS FargateAmazon S3IAM / SSOSecrets ManagerDagsterPythonGit / CI-CD

ETL & Databases

Informatica PowerCenterSSISTalendSQL ServerTeradataSingleStoreApache IcebergKafkaSpark

Governance & Quality

RBACOpenMetadataGreat ExpectationsPII MaskingPDPL / NDMOGDPR / PIPLData Contracts

BI

Power BIDAXTableauSSRSExcel

AI Engineering

Anthropic APIAgent DesignMCP ServersSnowflake CortexLLM-over-WarehouseModel Selection & EvaluationSelf-Hosted InferenceQuantization & KV-Cache

Achievements

DAMA Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP) DAMA International
Certificate of Appreciation – NDMO Project (03/2024) STC Channels

Recognized by executive leadership for achieving 99% compliance with NDMO standards for STC.

Performance Excellence (02/2023) Master Works

Awarded for leading the design and development of a full-scale Data Warehouse for ETEC, delivering enterprise ETL pipelines, data models, BI reporting and data quality controls.

Languages

ArabicNative or Bilingual Proficiency
PolishElementary Proficiency
EnglishFull Professional Proficiency

Education

Computer Science Bachelor's degree Al-Imam Mohammad bin Saud University 03/2020
English Diploma British Council

Selected Projects

Multi-Model LLM Inference Service
Personal project
Achievements/Tasks
  • Implemented a multi-model LLM inference service with token streaming and session state, achieving 70 tok/s on constrained hardware.
  • Optimized inference throughput 2.5× through quantization and KV-cache tuning.