GAURAV SHARMA
Beaverton,OR
Summary
Dynamic and customer-focused Solutions Architect with over 20 years of experience delivering scalable data, analytics, and AI/ML solutions for enterprise and public sector clients. Expertise in architecting compliant data platforms utilizing AWS technologies such as Redshift, Glue, Lake Formation, EMR, and SageMaker Unified Studio, alongside big data frameworks like Hadoop and Spark. Proven track record of driving customer success through technical consulting, hands-on proof of concepts, and innovative solution design for mission-critical systems. Recognized thought leader and AWS Certified Senior Speaker, consistently delivering impactful presentations at global summits with a 4.8/5 CSAT rating, while authoring insightful technical blogs and workshops on modern data architectures and AI-powered solutions.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Specialist Solutions Architect — Data & Analytics
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Beaverton
10.2020 - Current
- Trusted advisor to strategic public sector customers including Universities, multiple State Governments, various Govtech customers guiding them in building robust data foundations for AI and Generative AI use cases.
- Led Redshift price-performance PoC for a Fortune 500 public safety technology company: identified root cause of performance bottlenecks, translated complex Redshift stored procedures to Apache Spark/Glue, reducing transformation time from 2 hrs to 20 min.
- Won compete PoC against Azure Databricks for the same customer $180K ARR big data workload by designing CJIS-compliant architecture on AWS native services (EMR, Glue) in GovCloud.
- Led SageMaker Unified Studio pilots for various state agencies and Universities , proving SMUS as the entry point for data foundations supporting analytics and AI/ML use cases.
- Developed and presented technical workshop on Amazon Redshift Data Sharing at AWS Washington DC Summit (CSAT: 4.58).
- Co-delivered high-impact Data & AI workshops for GovTech customers (DC, CSAT: 4.6) and Education customers (Boston, CSAT: 4.8) including hands-on SageMaker Unified Studio sessions.
- Provided extensive field feedback and bug reports on SageMaker Unified Studio and Sagemaker Catalog and Sagemaker Lakehouse to service teams, influencing product roadmap and messaging.
Sr. Premier Support Engineer / Senior Technical Account Manager
Cloudera Inc.
04.2020 - 10.2020
- Advised enterprise and public sector clients on Cloudera HDP/CDH administration, driving platform upgrades and integration testing for mission-critical data environments.
- Led quarterly Technical Reviews (QTRs), presenting strategic roadmaps aligned with customer objectives.
Staff Customer Operations Engineer
Cloudera Inc.
02.2016 - 04.2020
- Provided advanced support for Hadoop ecosystem (HDFS, Spark, HBase, Hive, Ranger, Phoenix), resolving complex issues for enterprise and public sector clients.
- Served as Americas Pillar Lead and SME for HDFS, HBase, and Phoenix, guiding strategic initiatives and technical escalations.
- Built and led a support team in Costa Rica from 0 to 40+ engineers, driving recruitment, onboarding, and technical excellence.
- Authored performance tuning guidelines including 5-part HBase tuning series and 4-part Phoenix indexing series on Medium.
Sr. Technical Support Engineer
Oracle Inc.
04.2013 - 02.2016
- Delivered expert-level support for Oracle Linux and Virtualization environments, resolving high-severity incidents.
- Optimized Linux kernel and Oracle databases (Exadata, Exalogic), enhancing performance through configuration tuning.
Service Delivery Consultant
HP Globalsoft Pvt. Ltd.
10.2011 - 04.2013
- Administered and optimized Linux servers and databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL); automated tasks using Puppet and Bash, reducing manual effort by 20%.
Senior Engineer
CSC (now DXC Technology)
09.2008 - 09.2011
- Ensured high availability of Linux systems through proactive monitoring, tuning, and capacity planning. Quality Champion and Internal Auditor.
Applications Architect
USinternetworking Inc. (now AT&T)
04.2007 - 09.2008
- Designed high-availability architectures for Oracle database systems with disaster recovery and capacity planning.
Project Engineer
IDRBT (R&D wing of Reserve Bank of India)
01.2006 - 04.2007
- Managed enterprise Linux and database infrastructure; led RFP evaluations ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science and Engineering
Rajiv Gandhi Technical University
Bhopal, India01-2005
Skills
- Cloud platform expertise: AWS, GCP, Azure
- AWS data analytics expertise: EMR, Glue, Lakeformation, Redshift, Sagemaker Unified Studio, Opensearch, Quick Suite
- Proficient in AWS DynamoDB, DocumentDB, and RDS
- Big data technologies: HDFS, HBase, Hive, Spark
- Experience with AI Assistants, LLMs and Amazon Bedrock
- SQL and Python programming
- AI-driven architecture design
- Container orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
Certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty
- AWS Certified AI Practitioner
- AWS Certified Senior Speaker
- Hortonworks Data Platform Certified Administrator
Timeline
Specialist Solutions Architect — Data & Analytics
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
10.2020 - Current
Sr. Premier Support Engineer / Senior Technical Account Manager
Cloudera Inc.
04.2020 - 10.2020
Staff Customer Operations Engineer
Cloudera Inc.
02.2016 - 04.2020
Sr. Technical Support Engineer
Oracle Inc.
04.2013 - 02.2016
Service Delivery Consultant
HP Globalsoft Pvt. Ltd.
10.2011 - 04.2013
Senior Engineer
CSC (now DXC Technology)
09.2008 - 09.2011
Applications Architect
USinternetworking Inc. (now AT&T)
04.2007 - 09.2008
Project Engineer
IDRBT (R&D wing of Reserve Bank of India)
01.2006 - 04.2007
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science and Engineering
Rajiv Gandhi Technical University
PUBLICATIONS & BLOGS
- Define per-team resource limits for big data workloads using Amazon EMR Serverless (AWS Blog)
- Enhance your workload resilience with new Amazon EMR instance fleet features (AWS Blog)
- Securing Q-Business Web Experience (AWS Blog, co-author)
- Tuning HBase for Optimized Performance — 5-part series (Medium)
- Phoenix Indexes and Performance Tuning — 4-part series (Medium)
- End to end one click deployable workshop on “AI Powered Medallion Architecture”
- One click deployable workshop on “Building Semantic layer on your structured and unstructured data”
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Architected data & analytics solutions for 10+ strategic GovTech customers with $1M+ ARR across Healthcare, Public Safety, and Education domains.
- Led successful compete PoC for Motorola Solutions ($1.7M ARR), reducing complex transformation time from 2 hours to 20 minutes, saving significant Redshift compute costs.
- Built multiple demos and customer enablement workshops on AI-powered Medallion Architecture and Governed Semantic Layers for structured and unstructured data.
- Delivered 5+ speaking engagements at Global AWS Summits with average CSAT of 4.8/5; co-delivered Data & AI workshops scoring 4.6-4.8 CSAT.
- Led successful pilots on SageMaker Unified Studio for state agencies and universities, establishing it as a GTM entry point for data foundations.
- Gold Member of Analytics TFC and Generative AI Ambassador within AIML TFC at AWS.
AWARDS & RECOGNITION
Winner — Hortonworks 2018 Summit Awards Dinner (Founder's Award), MVP Award — HP Globalsoft Pvt. Ltd., Q4 2011, Quality Champion — CSC India Pvt. Ltd., 2010