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Saeed Almekhlfi

Senior Data Engineer & Data Team Lead
๐Ÿ“ Riyadh, Saudi Arabia [email protected] LinkedIn GitHub

Senior data engineer and team lead. I help build and run the Enterprise Data Platform at Esports World Cup Foundation โ€” a Snowflake warehouse that turns ticketing, attendance, viewership, and competition data into trusted, governed metrics. I build pipelines that are cheap to run, models that are correct, and access that is provable.

Experience

Senior Data Engineer & Team Lead
Esports World Cup Foundation
May 2026 โ€” Present
  • Enabled event-day decision-making for executive leadership by architecting the enterprise data platform โ€” a layered Snowflake warehouse with orchestrated ingestion from ticketing, attendance, competition & viewership โ€” turning fragmented sources into a single governed source of truth for the Esports World Cup.
  • Made an AI analytics capability legally deployable by designing the compliance architecture for natural-language querying: in-Kingdom residency, zero data retention, least-privilege scoped access, and a data-owner approval workflow. Cleared cybersecurity & executive review, and shipped.
  • Cut recurring platform cost by an order of magnitude on refactored pipelines โ€” designed cost attribution from warehouse metadata, then re-architected ingestion from per-row inserts to bulk staged loading.
  • Made platform access provable under audit by designing the RBAC architecture (access vs functional roles, defined inheritance, closed grant-drift gaps) alongside PII masking across 100+ columns aligned to PDPL / NDMO.
  • Protected the foundation's position on a vendor-delivered platform โ€” defined phase acceptance criteria and verified delivered state against the approved design, converting design-to-build divergences into a prioritised, evidence-backed remediation plan.
  • Kept the platform live through a global event โ€” per-source freshness SLAs, failure isolation across the ingestion fleet, data-condition alerting, and pre-written recovery runbooks.
Data Engineering Team Lead / Architecture
STC Channels
Sep 2023 โ€” May 2026
  • Designed & governed a scalable Data Lakehouse (Alibaba OSS, Apache Iceberg, Dagster) โ€” reduced data latency by 50%, enabling real-time analytics.
  • Achieved 100% NDMO regulatory compliance across the BI department via robust data-governance frameworks.
  • Migrated legacy pipelines (SSIS, SQL Server) to cloud-native architecture without disrupting critical reporting.
  • Resolved complex production issues across a hybrid Alibaba Cloud + on-premises landscape; mentored junior engineers.
Data Engineer
Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA)
Mar 2023 โ€” Sep 2023
  • Designed, developed & deployed ETL pipelines using Informatica PowerCenter for stakeholders and data scientists.
  • Owned full-lifecycle data integration โ€” mappings, workflows, and data flows.
  • Ensured data accuracy and SLA compliance; troubleshot discrepancies and performance issues.
ETL & BI Developer
ETEC โ€” Education & Training Evaluation Commission ยท Master Works
Dec 2020 โ€” 2023
  • Delivered a centralized national-education data warehouse powering executive BI dashboards.
  • Improved report accuracy by 40% with robust data-integrity & error-handling logic in ETL.
  • Led extraction from diverse sources (SQL, flat files); built custom SSRS reports.
ETL & BI Developer
MCIT ยท King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital ยท Master Works
Earlier
  • Designed & maintained DBMS: data modeling, cleansing, transformation, and validation.
  • Built SSIS ETL jobs into the data warehouse; authored ETL specs and Tableau dashboards for leadership.
iOS Developer
Transporter Bus Centrum ยท Gdaล„sk, Poland
Earlier
  • Built networked iOS apps in Swift โ€” REST (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE), Codable JSON, MVC, GCD, authentication.

Data Stack

Warehouse & Transform

SnowflakedbtSQLSnowparkMasking PoliciesResource Monitors

Orchestration & Modelling

Airflow (AWS MWAA)KimballStar SchemasMedallion ArchitectureSCDs

ETL & Databases

Informatica PowerCenterSSISTalendSQL ServerTeradataSingleStoreAmazon S3

Governance & Quality

RBACOpenMetadataGreat ExpectationsTalend DQData ProfilingPII MaskingPDPL / NDMOData Contracts

BI, Cloud & Languages

Power BINLQAWS (MWAA, S3, IAM)SSO / SAMLPythonGit / CI-CD

AI Engineering

Anthropic APIAgent DesignMCP ServersLLM-over-Warehouse

Achievements

DAMA CDMP

Certified Data Management Professional โ€” DAMA International.

NDMO Project Appreciation ยท 2024

STC executive recognition for 99% NDMO compliance.

Performance Excellence ยท 2023

Led ETEC Data Warehouse delivery โ€” Master Works.

Education

BSc, Computer Science

Al-Imam Mohammad bin Saud University ยท 2020

English Diploma

British Council

Languages

Arabic โ€” Native ยท English โ€” Full Professional ยท Polish โ€” Elementary