Hi, I'm Rafael Ignaulin
Senior Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer @ Nike · Founder @ isTech Billion-row pipelines, delivered from anywhere.
About Me
I'm a Senior Data Engineer and the founder of isTech, the consultancy my B2B contracts run through — currently delivering for Nike and Inter&Co, with operations expanding into Oceania and Europe. Day-to-day I lead data platform work at Nike — terabyte-range Spark pipelines, A/B testing automation, an LLM analytics agent, and the clickstream data foundation behind Marketing and Digital Experience analytics. I work AI-native: Claude and Cursor are part of my daily toolchain, and I ship the systems that make that possible for others (MCP servers, agents, RAG). I've worked remotely from 15+ countries across Europe, Oceania, and South America, collaborating daily with teams in India, Ireland, the US, Canada, and Australia, always aligned to my clients' hours. Currently based in Australia.
Education
M.S. Computer Science (OMSCS)
Georgia Institute of Technology
In Progress
One of the world's top-ranked online CS master's programs
Bachelor in Computer Science
Unochapecó
2020 - 2023
Student Honor Medal — Top 1% of graduating class
Languages
English: C2 — Professional Proficiency
Portuguese: Native
Key Achievements
- ✓Cut Spark data reads 98% at Nike (multi-terabyte per run down to tens of GB), cutting AWS costs 70%
- ✓Automated Nike's A/B test measurement end-to-end with Airflow — weeks to minutes, ~50x more iterations
- ✓Own the clickstream data foundation powering Nike's Marketing and Digital Experience analytics (billions of rows, Databricks/Spark/Airflow)
- ✓Built an LLM analytics agent at Nike (Claude Sonnet, Streamlit, MLflow) that turns plain-English questions into SQL
- ✓Own end-to-end a client segmentation and advisor-allocation platform at Inter&Co impacting 40M+ customers
- ✓Founded isTech, a B2B data engineering consultancy delivering to US enterprise clients across 6+ timezones
Professional Experience
Senior Data Engineer (Data Foundation, Marketing & Digital Experience)
Nike (Contract via isTech)
Portland, OR (Remote)
Jan 2024 - Present
- •Cut Spark data reads 98% at Nike (multi-terabyte per run down to tens of GB) through partition pruning, Catalyst tuning, and AQE — cutting AWS infrastructure costs 70% in the process.
- •Automated Nike's A/B test measurement end-to-end with Airflow, cutting turnaround from weeks to minutes: 99.5% faster, about 50x more iterations for product teams.
- •Own the clickstream fact table Marketing and Digital Experience analytics run on: billions of rows, hundreds of GB, millions of new rows added daily, rebuilt on Databricks/Spark with advanced SQL (grouping sets, cross joins, rolling lookback windows) and orchestrated with Airflow.
- •Built an LLM analytics agent (Claude Sonnet, Streamlit, MLflow) — a multi-thousand-line Python codebase — that turns plain-English questions into SQL, with confidence scoring so low-confidence answers get flagged instead of trusted blindly.
- •Built a FastMCP/FastAPI server exposing a dozen-plus analytics tools to Cursor. New tools are a YAML file, not a code change.
- •Contributed a dozen loader classes plus a shared helper class to the team's Databricks/Airflow job library — task orchestration, Delta load/validate, A/B testing, freshness checks.
- •Debugged a large production analytics API (dozens of metrics, hundreds of dimensions), root-causing recurring routing, table, and RLS bugs, and built a sizable cache-validation test suite to catch cached-vs-fresh discrepancies.
Data Engineering Lead (Client Segmentation & Advisor Allocation)
Inter&Co (Contract via isTech)
São Paulo, Brazil (Remote)
Jan 2023 - Present
- •Own end-to-end the data platform that segments a digital bank's entire client base (Inter One, Black, Win tiers) and assigns each client to an advisor — millions of individual and business clients, impacting 40M+ customers overall, driven by a rule-based engine built against multiple financial signals, working directly with director-level stakeholders.
- •Built a 6-zone medallion lakehouse on S3 and Delta Lake, orchestrated by Airflow across EMR and Kubernetes, replacing ad hoc pipelines with one consistent, config-driven architecture across 8 repositories.
- •Designed CDC ingestion from the bank's operational database via Kafka/MSK and Debezium, plus a near-real-time update engine — Spark micro-batches on Kubernetes with Kafka and DynamoDB integrations — that keeps segmentation current every 15-20 minutes between batch cycles.
- •Built a reusable data-quality framework — document validation, composable rule chaining, structured error logging — adopted across every ingestion pipeline on the platform.
- •Designed the advisor-allocation algorithm that load-balances clients across advisor portfolios by product, region, and financial score, and set the engineering standards (testing, CI/CD, error alerting) the team's 8 repositories now follow.
- •Progressed Mid-Level → Senior → Lead across the engagement, growing from delivering pipelines to owning the platform and its engineering standards.
Founder & Principal Data Engineer
isTech (Own Consultancy)
Remote — Global
Jan 2023 - Present
- •Founded the B2B data engineering consultancy all my contract work runs through — currently delivering for Nike and Inter&Co, spanning Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, and Lakehouses on AWS, Azure, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, and Terraform.
- •Delivered from 15+ countries across Europe, South America, and Oceania while holding enterprise contracts, always aligned to client hours, collaborating daily with teams in India, Ireland, the US, Canada, and Australia across 6+ timezones.
- •Expanding into Oceania and Europe, with a professional network across Ireland, US, Canada, India, and Australia.
Data Engineer (Junior → Mid-Level)
PagSeguro / PagBank (Full-time)
São Paulo, Brazil (Remote)
Apr 2021 - Oct 2024
- •Designed and tuned an Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse with star/snowflake schemas, optimizing queries across 20+ tables with billions of rows (distribution/sort keys, compression, EXPLAIN) for a 10x performance gain, enabling Power BI dashboards that cut report generation from hours to minutes.
- •Promoted from Junior to Mid-Level Data Engineer; wound the role down in Oct 2024 as contract work through isTech became the focus.
Featured Projects
A selection of impactful data engineering projects I've led and contributed to at Nike, Inter&Co, and other organizations.
US Enterprise Data Platform — isTech
isTech
End-to-end data engineering engagement for a US enterprise client, architecting a Lakehouse on AWS with Spark, Kafka, Airflow, and Terraform. Delivered production infrastructure while operating across US, Brazilian, and Oceanian timezones simultaneously.
Impact: Production data platform in market; client operating across 3 timezones
Clickstream Data Foundation
Nike
Session-grain clickstream fact table rebuilt daily on Databricks/Spark — billions of rows, millions added per day — using advanced Spark SQL (window functions, higher-order functions, pure-SQL funnel state machine). The single source of truth behind Marketing and Digital Experience dashboards, a production analytics API, and an LLM analytics agent.
Impact: One well-validated fact table powering every downstream analytics product
A/B Test Automation Platform
Nike
End-to-end automation for measuring multiple A/B tests with Airflow and Python, replacing weeks of manual measurement work.
Impact: Measurement time from weeks to minutes — ~50x more iterations for product teams
Multi-Terabyte Pipeline Optimization
Nike
Optimized multi-terabyte Spark pipelines through partition pruning, Catalyst tuning, and Adaptive Query Execution.
Impact: 98% reduction in data reads per run; AWS infrastructure costs cut 70%
LLM Analytics Agent
Nike
Production NL→SQL analytics agent on Claude Sonnet via Databricks Model Serving — Streamlit UI, conversation memory, MLflow tracing, and embedding-based confidence scoring against a curated ground-truth set so low-confidence answers get flagged for review.
Impact: Analysts self-serve analytics in plain English, with auditable confidence on every answer
Cloud Migration to Databricks
Nike
Migrated data platform workloads from a hybrid cloud setup to the Databricks Lakehouse (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog), following Lakehouse best practices.
Impact: Modern Lakehouse foundation for the analytics platform
Analytics MCP Server
Nike
FastMCP/FastAPI server exposing internal analytics APIs as tools inside Cursor, with YAML-driven dynamic tool registration — adding an endpoint is a config file, not a code change.
Impact: A dozen-plus analytics tools available to AI-assisted workflows, zero-code onboarding
40M+ Customer Segmentation Platform
Inter&Co
End-to-end platform segmenting a digital bank's entire client base and assigning each client to an advisor — rule-based engine over multiple financial signals, 6-zone medallion lakehouse on S3/Delta Lake.
Impact: Personalized advisory for 40M+ customers, batch + near-real-time
Real-Time Segmentation Updates
Inter&Co
CDC ingestion from the bank's operational database (Kafka/MSK, Debezium, Schema Registry) plus a near-real-time engine — Spark micro-batches on Kubernetes — keeping segmentation current between batch cycles.
Impact: Segmentation data current every 15-20 minutes, feeding Kafka, DynamoDB, CRM, and DW
Technical Skills
Comprehensive expertise across the modern data engineering stack, from distributed processing to cloud infrastructure.
Languages
Big Data & Streaming
Cloud
Data Platforms
Orchestration & IaC
Databases
AI & Agentic
BI & Visualization
APIs & Frameworks
The Value I Bring
What sets me apart as a data engineer and the value I bring to organizations.
Performance Optimization
Cut Spark data reads 98% and AWS costs 70% on multi-terabyte pipelines through partition pruning, Catalyst tuning, and AQE.
Scalability & Architecture
Own data foundations at billions of rows with millions added daily — medallion lakehouses, Delta Lake, config-driven pipeline frameworks.
Ownership & Leadership
Run platforms end-to-end that 40M+ customers depend on, from architecture through data quality to the algorithms on top.
AI & Agentic Systems
Built a production LLM analytics agent and the MCP server behind it — NL→SQL with confidence scoring, MLflow tracing, YAML-driven tool registration.
Real-Time Capabilities
CDC streaming with Kafka and Debezium plus near-real-time update engines keeping analytical tables current in minutes, not days.
Certified Depth
13+ professional certifications across AWS, Databricks, Azure, and Oracle — including SA Professional and Databricks Data Engineer Professional.
isTech
B2B Data Engineering Consultancy
Expert data engineering consultancy serving US enterprise clients, with operations expanding into Oceania and Europe. Founded and led by a Senior Data Engineer delivering hands-on for Nike and Inter&Co.
Visit isTech →Data Platform Architecture
Design and build production-grade data platforms: Lakehouses, Data Warehouses, and real-time streaming systems.
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS, Azure, and Databricks — migrations, optimization, and IaC with Terraform and Kubernetes.
AI & Agentic Systems
LLM integration, MCP servers, RAG pipelines, and AI-powered data products on modern data stacks.
Enterprise Consulting
Data strategy, architecture design, and fractional principal engineering for data-driven organizations.
Why Choose isTech?
Expert in modern data stack (Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Airflow)
13+ professional certifications (AWS, Databricks, Azure)
Proven track record at Nike and Inter&Co
Active contracts with US enterprise clients
Certifications & Credentials
13+ professional certifications demonstrating commitment to continuous learning and technical excellence across cloud platforms and data technologies.
Apache Airflow
Astronomer Certification DAG Authoring for Apache Airflow 3
Astronomer
Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow 2 Fundamentals
Astronomer
AWS
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Partner: Accreditation (Business)
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Partner: Technical Accredited - Training Badge
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Data Engineer Associate
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Black Belt
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
Azure
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
Microsoft
Databricks
Databricks Data Engineer Professional
Databricks
Oracle
Oracle Infrastructure Foundations Associate
Oracle
Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations
Oracle
Global Perspective
Hands-on experience working remotely from 15+ countries across Europe, Oceania, and South America. This lifestyle has sharpened my async communication, adaptability, and ability to collaborate effectively with distributed teams across time zones — skills directly transferable to global remote roles.
Let's Connect
Interested in discussing data engineering, collaboration opportunities, or just want to chat? Feel free to reach out.