Dewei Zhai

Experience

1. Feb 2026 — present

   Enyquant

   Data Platform Owner & Platform Architect

   • Built the startup’s cloud and data platform from architecture and code through deployment and daily operations.
   • Delivered five years of national electricity operations and market data within 60 days; defined point-in-time visibility for model training.
   • Moved comparable daily workloads from Databricks + ADF to DuckDB, Polars and DuckLake on one VM, reducing monthly cost by about 95%.
   Project retrospective →

2. Nov 2023 — Oct 2025

   PVH · Tommy Hilfiger & Calvin Klein

   Lead Data Engineer

   • Acted as architecture lead in a roughly ten-person team supporting a 500+TB AWS platform.
   • Introduced YAML contracts, validation and a DAG factory. A representative dashboard delivery cycle fell from 4–6 weeks to 1–2 hours; the platform served 60+ dashboards.
   • Rebuilt a controlled PII workflow using event-driven serverless: typical latency 2 hours → 5–10 minutes; related AWS cost about 90% lower.
   Project retrospective →

3. Sep 2022 — Jan 2024

   VodafoneZiggo

   Senior Data Engineer

   • Evolved Scala/Spark ETL and operated AWS DMS Full Load + CDC for an Oracle-to-Snowflake migration within a 100+ person Data Tribe.
   • Automated PowerCenter conversion and validation in GitLab CI/CD for 40+ developers: feedback hours/days → minutes; an estimated 40+ hours of manual work saved weekly.
   • Built JupyterHub + MLflow services for 4–5 data scientists.
   Project retrospective →

4. Dec 2020 — Aug 2022

   PVH

   Senior Data Engineer

   • Built Adobe, Salesforce and SAP integrations on a 500+TB AWS platform after the original migration neared completion.
   • Developed configuration-driven, idempotent ETL and improved data quality, observability and cross-time-zone scheduling.

5. Aug 2018 — Nov 2020

   FedEx · former TNT Digital

   Data Engineer

   • Managed AWS/GCP infrastructure with Terraform; developed BigQuery and Spark/EMR workloads. Deployed, migrated and operated Spark on an existing GKE cluster.
   • Reworked a Spark job covering 175 business cases: previously failed with OOM after three hours; the complete workload then ran in under five minutes.

6. Feb 2018 — Jul 2018

   ABN AMRO

   Data Engineer

   • Built Python/Spark/Hive pipelines for the DIAL platform and migrated Hive workloads to PySpark.
   • Automated a recurring Excel workflow: about three days of manual work each week → a roughly three-minute process.

7. Nov 2016 — Jan 2018

   KPN

   Big Data Consultant

   • Delivered and operated bare-metal Hortonworks HDP clusters for enterprise customers, with Hive/Spark ETL and Python/Ansible/Jenkins automation.
   • Built a Robot Framework health-validation suite, saving the team more than eight hours of manual checks per week.

8. Oct 2012 — Nov 2016

   KPN

   Network Quality Engineer

   • Led technical validation and production acceptance for telecom solutions, including design reviews, testing and operational handover. Used Python and PostgreSQL for analysis and automation.

9. Jun 2009 — Oct 2012

   Huawei

   Software Test Engineer

   • Led testing and delivery for a KPN Netherlands core-network database cutover. The team migrated 12M subscribers with zero production incidents, following months of testing and staged migration planning.