David Morel
Staff Data Platform Engineer
I build production systems fast and run them at scale, with depth all the way down to kernel tuning and low-level systems debugging. Currently available for new engagements on a contract basis or open to considering the right FTE role.
The Habit of Being Early
Championed agent-assisted development on the team — proved the value hands-on, earned the buy-in, and put the guardrails in place.
Enterprise-grade automation at a circular-economy scale-up — IaC-everywhere, a multi-account Snowflake deploy pipeline from first principles.
AWS DMS on Redshift in production with a home-built dynamic-capacity safety net, when DMS couldn't carry the load alone.
Co-founded the original Big Data / Hadoop initiative — multi-petabyte cluster from scratch, operated daily and nightly.
Experience
Most senior engineer on a 6-person team building a modern, self-service enterprise data platform from the ground up — medallion architecture on Databricks + Unity Catalog, dbt orchestrated via Airflow/Cosmos on Kubernetes.
- Executed complex migrations of legacy pipelines to the modern stack in record time.
- Introduced agent-assisted development with a hardened, sandboxed setup.
- Built purpose-built utilities (DuckDB-based) for bulk ingress/egress.
- Codified Unity Catalog schema creation and reverse-engineered Fabric APIs.
- Mentored senior and medior engineers through code reviews and design.
Architected and automated cloud infrastructure using Pulumi across 30+ AWS services. Built a multi-account Snowflake deployment pipeline and implemented cloud stack audit via Snowpipe.
- Personally adopted and started using GitHub Copilot heavily for platform and infrastructure automation.
- Built a Zendesk ticket classification workflow on Azure OpenAI.
- Designed CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions on self-hosted runners.
- Stood up a production data platform on Snowflake and dbt in two months.
Founding hire for BI data engineering. Designed and built the department’s entire infrastructure from near-zero.
- Built a greenfield Airflow platform for all data orchestration.
- Hired and led teams of up to 12 direct reports; 20+ hires total.
- Led Tableau platform integration during merger, serving 10,000+ users.
- Established 24/7 on-call culture with IaC and automation.
Focused on Big Data platforms and A/B testing for clients across France, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Founding member of multiple critical initiatives at one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms.
- Co-founded the Hadoop initiative (2010), building multi-petabyte clusters.
- Built a self-service ops layer and ML-based monitoring for clusters.
- Architected system scaling personalised emails to millions of subscribers.
- Designed the foundation for website user accounts and personalisation.
Personal Explorations
I use agent-assisted coding as a force multiplier inside hard engineering guardrails. Recent projects include a FastAPI/gRPC ingestion pipeline pushed to production grade, a local-LLM photo workflow for Lightroom, and sharp macOS tools built to address specific workflow gaps at home or at work.