Yashwanth Santhanam
Argyle,TX
Summary
Senior Data Engineer with 10+ years of experience designing and delivering robust, distributed data systems and high-throughput pipelines across large-scale enterprise environments. Proven record of driving multi-million-dollar impact, optimizing complex workflows, and enabling high-visibility analytics and ML solutions.
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Data Engineer
Lowe's
12.2021 - Current
- Designed medallion architecture framework adopted across teams, reducing ETL development time by 30%.
- Migrated legacy Hadoop pipelines to GCP, prototyping modern patterns for efficiency and scalability.
- Built high-volume Spark & Airflow pipelines powering company-wide sales analytics and ML workflows.
- Identified $6M in missed sales data across company-wide metrics, collaborating with multiple teams to enhance visibility at VP level.
- Achieved 5th place in company-wide AI hackathon, showcasing innovation and technical skills.
Data Engineer III
Expedia
06.2019 - 12.2021
- Optimized Spark pipelines: backfill runtime 2 weeks → 19 hours; introduced salting strategy → 900% performance gain.
- Built ETL features for Clickstream, MediaDB, and Marketo campaigns, achieving 25% increase in data accuracy.
- Processed 7 GB/hour JSON streams, facilitating comprehensive 2-year booking analytics.
- Led VRBO property graph analytics project to enhance cross-team reporting and deliver actionable insights.
Senior ETL Developer (Contract)
Verizon
07.2015 - 05.2019
- Built ETL pipelines impacting 1.8M customers and $5.2M revenue.
- Optimized batch workflows to reduce runtime by 40% and developed streaming pipelines for XML, ORC, and Avro data.
- Developed Customer 360 data lake to consolidate structured and semistructured data for enhanced analytics.
- Executed pricing campaigns, decreasing billing discrepancies by 15%.
Education
Post Graduate Program - AI & Machine Intelligence
The University of Texas At Austin
Austin, TX12-2025
MS - Management Information Systems
SUNY Buffalo
05-2015
Skills
- Python
- SQL
- Scala
- Java
- Spark
- Kafka
- Airflow
- Feature Engineering
- Batch & Streaming Pipelines
- AWS
- GCP
- Teradata
- ETL Design
- Distributed Systems
- Data Modeling
- Pipeline Optimization
Certification
- Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer, 2024
- Cloudera Certified Spark Developer, 2019
Projects
ML Data Pipeline Optimization: Modernized legacy ML pipelines to cloud-native GCP, achieving 4-6x runtime improvement. Optimized Spark & BigQuery workflows, enabling faster feature engineering and downstream ML experiments.
Timeline
Senior Data Engineer
Lowe's
12.2021 - Current
Data Engineer III
Expedia
06.2019 - 12.2021
Senior ETL Developer (Contract)
Verizon
07.2015 - 05.2019
Post Graduate Program - AI & Machine Intelligence
The University of Texas At Austin
MS - Management Information Systems
SUNY Buffalo