City of Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Experience : Cloud Data Architect DataBricks (inc Delta Lake) Data Engineering (inc Spark, Python) BI Competency Head BI Solutions/Data Architect Innovation and Automation Kimball practitioner Programme Management Project Planning Pyramid, Tableau and Power BI visualisation Team Management Technical Lead Worked in the following data domains Finance, Insurance, FMCG and Retail industries
Driving the vision and execution of scalable, integrated, and future-ready data solutions. I bridge strategy with hands-on delivery—shaping modern data platforms, guiding architectural standards, and actively contributing to complex projects. I collaborate across engineering, data science, and product teams to align solutions with business needs, while mentoring teams and building internal capability. Passionate about simplifying architectures, enabling innovation, and future-proofing platforms to unlock business value. I lead a high-performing team driving adoption of modern data technologies including Databricks, SQL, Spark, Delta Lake and Terraform—ensuring platforms are architecturally sound, scalable, and impactful. I design and deliver enterprise-grade architectures with strong multi-tenancy, secure data isolation and federation/governance at scale. This includes building Unity Catalog environments from the ground-up with clear domain separation and least-privilege access models. I operationalise Medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) architectures across batch and low-latency streaming workloads, with a strong focus on Spark and Delta performance optimisation, workload isolation and cost efficiency.
Providing a roadmap and driving the design and implementation of data architecture through DataOrbis and the Smollan group. Frequent communication with business to understand current issues and challenges helps inform the architectural design to address, solve and prevent issues. It is important that we facilitate the business taking control of the data and getting the most value possible. To this end diagrams and presentations help the business understand and buy into the reference architectures and plans. A holistic approach is adopted to any modelling or reference architectures that are designed like the current MDM project. Multiple stakeholders and different functions in the business will use the MDM, so the blueprint must be flexible/robust enough to serve all area’s needs. Also leveraging the power and importance of good routines around data governance, master data and metadata in the organisation. R&D and innovation are other key functions of the role. We are investigating a move from traditional databases to DataBricks / Delta Lake technology to build a Lake House implemented with files in Azure Data Lake. It is important to stay abreast of new technologies and how they could be included or applied to future or current architectures.
Promoting clarity and efficiency in using data to drive decision-making. More focussed on architecture for specific products for example On-Shelf Availability which takes retailer data and provides insights and metrics to field teams. As part of solution architecture, we lay down development standards and ways of working like Azure DevOps. Business analysis forms a very important role in understanding the business and functional requirements of a solution and the data model and architecture design. All solution architecture and development are performed in Azure cloud, using Data Factory, Data Lake and cloud databases (Azure SQL and dedicated SQL pools). Documentation and diagrams also form a key conduit back into the business so consensus can be found. The buy in and adoption is always key to maximising the potential of data assets and architectures.
Defined strategy, department roadmap and building out of the BI solutions competency at Saratoga. Formed strategic partnerships and created key relationships. I was responsible for business development, budgeting, recruitment and the financial aspect of running the BI solutions department. Line management and mentorship of senior, intermediate and junior consultants from a career and technical perspective were further responsibilities. I was involved in architecture, design, requirements gathering and building of BI solutions also.
I was the manager of a junior/intermediate consultant team of BI developers, business analysts and testers at Saratoga. Principle mandate was to get the team up to speed and experienced in all facets of BI as well as delivering quality timeously. This was achieved through management, mentorship and getting the team onto strategic projects to gain the experience necessary. I developed BI solutions on a large scale re-architecture, dimensional modelling and data warehouse project. The data warehousing projects we embarked on followed the Kimball methodology and BDLC implementing Scrum and Agile. The technology facilitating the loading of the EDW was a combination of SQL, C# and SSIS. This also involved the laying down of frameworks, standards and ensuring performant and fit for purpose solutions. I was principally engaged in the data exploitation side of BI (SSRS & SSAS) when I started at Saratoga. I surfaced the solutions I developed to SharePoint 2010 and SSRS report portal as part of a self-service BI strategy. This gave me exposure to using OLAP cubes as a data source in reporting tools and writing complex parameterised MDX. I was required to dig very deep into SSAS, by building and performance tuning enterprise size cube solutions. Optimisation of dimension hierarchies, partitioning strategies, aggregation design and cache warming formed an integral piece of this performance tuning.
I managed three concurrent projects for a large overseas mobile message aggregator. I was responsible for accomplishing the project objectives and for driving and overseeing all the work inherent in the project from inception to completion and delivering on-time within budget. I applied and integrated project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, reporting and closing. I developed processes and ensured that the processes themselves were as efficient as possible to realise the project. I used a variety of mechanisms including meetings, and documents to ensure continued forward progress and to identify potential problems as soon as possible. We implemented the Agile methodology of software development, to stay flexible and deliver functional code to the client frequently (Sprints/ Iterations). We also followed Scrum due to its synergy with Agile implementing daily scrums across the distributed project teams to ensure drive and focus on goals/delivery. This assisted in management of the off shore development team (20 resources) in India, dealing with cultural, communication and the challenges of a distributed team. The client facing elements to the position included regular reporting to project stakeholders including upper management and clients at regular pre-agreed times and in a predetermined manner. Working with the business analysis, design and development teams to ensure that what was being built matched the Client specifications. From an internal perspective I provided the catalyst to keep the software development process running and keeping the entire development team working with each other and moving forward. It was imperative that we delivered within the expected time frame by instilling a sense of urgency and striving for delivery excellence.
Developed and managed SQL database systems while ensuring high levels of data integrity and accuracy. I coordinated the receiving and querying of data from various clients and building and maintaining relationships with key data sources. Assisted in the extraction, loading and manipulation of data and developing queries, reports and OLAP cubes using the Microsoft BI stack i.e. SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. The role required the ability to research and troubleshoot technical problems and provide support to monthly operations.