Available for contract · Netherlands
Zhe Ren, or call me Brian
Data Platform Engineer & Data Engineer
6+ years building large-scale data platforms in Europe — pipelines, lakehouse architecture, and production reliability at scale.
Profile
Data Engineer with 6+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms, specialising in scalable pipeline development, ETL/ELT architecture, and production reliability. Hands-on experience with Python, dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, and AWS, with a strong track record of end-to-end ownership across ingestion, transformation, data quality, and observability.
Co-architected a streaming-first market data platform operating ~200 pipelines in a regulated, high-volume European energy trading environment. Currently transitioning to freelance consulting, available for contract engagements in the Netherlands.
Skills
Cloud — AWS
S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, MSK, EC2
Cloud — GCP
GKE, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, GCS
Languages
Python, SQL, Bash
Data Tools
Spark, dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Databricks, Snowflake
Infra & DevOps
Terraform, Helm, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins
Observability
Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry
All product names, logos, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification purposes only.
Experience
Data Platform Engineer / Data Engineer
Dexter Energy
- Co-led and built the Market Data Platform (MDP) from scratch — Medallion + Kappa architecture, ~200 pipelines, ~90% legacy migration completed.
- Designed a connector-based ingestion framework (polling and push) with YAML data contracts as the single source of truth for schema validation.
- Implemented 7–9 production connectors (EPEX MATS, EEX, Volue, APG, GME, IPTO, DAMAS) with custom rate-limit handling.
- Built core platform mechanisms: sanitisation, idempotent ingestion, Redis-backed distributed deduplication.
- Owned production reliability — triaging data gaps, schema drift, and outages; improved observability via Grafana, Prometheus, and Sentry.
- Maintained dbt consolidation layer feeding DWH, analytics, and model pipelines.
Data Platform Engineer
FedEx
- Designed scalable ELT pipelines ingesting multi-domain enterprise datasets and SaaS platforms (Salesforce, Google Ads) into a centralised data platform.
- Orchestrated ELT pipelines using Apache Airflow — self-hosted via Terraform, later migrated to Cloud Composer.
- Delivered self-service PySpark/SQL templates enabling 50+ analysts to build and schedule jobs independently.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
- Enabled lakehouse data exploration through Apache Superset.
- Operated platform infrastructure on GKE including orchestration, compute runtime, and monitoring.
Data Engineer
FedEx via Xccelerated
- Built data pipelines and microservices for the O2P migration (TNT → FedEx).
- Developed orchestration tooling for hourly migration across users.
- Built an MVP with scheduled PySpark SQL jobs + microservices for automated campaign engagement (Salesforce / Adobe Target).
Education
MSc Biomedical Engineering
University of Groningen
BSc Biomedical Engineering
South China University of Technology
