Data Engineer • Big Data • Curious Builder
📍 Riyadh | 🌍 Explorer at heart
🧠 Turning data into something useful
🎮 Strategy games enthusiast
I’m a Data Engineer with a software engineering past.
I enjoy working where systems, data, and logic meet.
These days I spend most of my time:
- moving data reliably (and fixing it when it breaks),
- tuning Spark jobs that refuse to behave,
- designing data models that actually make sense,
- keeping big data platforms secure, fast, and boring (boring is good).
I like understanding things deeply — not just using them.
(tools come after thinking)
- 🐍 Python
- 🧮 SQL
- ⚡ Apache Spark / PySpark
- 🛫 Apache Airflow
- 🐘 Apache Hive
- 🚀 Apache Impala
- 📬 Apache Kafka
- 🌊 Apache Flink
- 🔁 Batch & Streaming Pipelines
- 🗂 Dimensional Modeling (Star / Snowflake)
- 🥇 Medallion Architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold)
- 🔄 ETL / ELT Design Patterns
- 📈 Analytics-Ready Datasets
- ✅ Data Quality & Validation
- 🧱 Cloudera CDP (HDFS, YARN, Hive, Spark)
- 🧠 Databricks
- ☁️ Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery)
- ☁️ AWS
- 🧩 Informatica (DEI / EDC)
- 🔍 Denodo
- 🐧 Linux (RHEL / CentOS)
- 📦 Docker
- 🔧 CI/CD Pipelines
- 🛡 Apache Ranger
- 🧭 Apache Atlas
- 🔐 Kerberos Authentication
- 🔒 TLS / SSL
- 🔥 Spark & SQL Performance Tuning
- 🧯 Production Incident Handling
- 🧊 Lakehouse Formats (Iceberg / Delta / Hudi)
- 🔎 Data Observability
- 🧱 Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
- ☸️ Kubernetes for Data Platforms
- 🧠 Distributed Systems Internals
A small selection of projects I enjoyed working on — some are analytical, some technical, all taught me something.
My personal data playground & archive.
A curated collection of my work in:
- Exploratory Data Analysis
- SQL case studies
- Business analytics
- Machine learning experiments
🔗 Explore here → 👉 https://github.com/MEDHAT-ALHADDAD/Data-Projects-Catalogue
This is where most of my data experiments live.
Streaming-first sentiment analysis pipeline (Arabic / English).
- Bronze → Silver → Gold architecture
- Batch + real-time processing
- Feature extraction for training & inference
- Production-inspired ML data platform design
Turning complex global data into readable insights.
- Real-world dataset
- Strong storytelling focus
- Insight-driven visualizations
🔗 https://github.com/MEDHAT-ALHADDAD/Global-Terrorism---Exploratory-Data-Analysis-and-Dashboarding
A fun but serious SQL project.
- Business-driven questions
- KPI-oriented thinking
- Clean analytical SQL
🔗 https://github.com/MEDHAT-ALHADDAD/Pizza_Runner
Sales, profit, and performance analysis.
- Practical business insights
- Dashboard-ready outputs
- Clear analytical reasoning
🔗 https://github.com/MEDHAT-ALHADDAD/Super-Store-Retail-Exploratory-Data-Analysis-and-Dashboarding
✨ More projects live in the catalogue — this is just the highlight reel.
(the real résumé)
Every data engineer has scars. These are some of mine.
-
🔥 Warehouse deleted in production
Recovered by prioritizing dependencies, restoring from DR, reprocessing Spark jobs, and backfilling critical tables — reports delivered the same day. -
🐌 Queries that never returned
Tracked down Hive small-files issues, fixed compaction & storage layout, and restored query reliability. -
⏰ Pipelines finishing at 4 PM (not acceptable)
Optimized Airflow concurrency, Spark/YARN resources, and moved to event-driven DAGs → pipelines completed by 6 AM. -
🌪️ Full production ownership during team absence
Ran Airflow, Spark, and Informatica pipelines solo for weeks — zero downtime, multiple incidents resolved. -
🔁 Replication stuck at 70% forever
Diagnosed platform issues, tuned jobs, and stabilized cross-cluster replication to 100%.
- Started as a full-stack & mobile developer
- Fell in love with data & analysis
- Ended up in big data platforms & banking systems
- Slowly moving toward data architecture & system design
I still enjoy clean code, good abstractions, and well-designed systems — just at data scale now.
- 🎮 Strategy games (Age of Empires, grand strategy, anything with thinking)
- 📚 Learning how distributed systems really work
- ✍️ Organizing knowledge (Notion, notes, diagrams)
- ☕ Over-engineering simple things for fun
⭐ This profile is a snapshot of how I think, build, break, and fix systems.