Ross L.

I design and build data platforms that are secure, cost-efficient and easy to run, from the warehouse and pipelines to the cloud infrastructure underneath. I've been a data engineer for over 10 years and freelancing on Upwork since 2016. I've worked with startups, US tech firms, a global investment manager and Australian government agencies. Some recent results: • Designed and built a production Snowflake platform from scratch for a regulated financial firm, fully automated with Terraform, dbt and Airflow, with role-based security and cost controls built in from day one • Built a DuckDB data lake that sped up the slowest compute jobs by up to 10x • Cut $400k/year from a client's AWS bill through data retention, archival, partitioning and right-sizing • Achieved 95% query performance improvements through Postgres tuning and team workshops • Migrated 2,000+ stored procedures from SQL Server to Aurora Postgres with zero data loss Where I can help • Data platform design and builds (Snowflake, Redshift, ClickHouse, Databricks, DuckDB) • Pipelines and orchestration (Python, dbt, Airflow, Prefect, Kafka) • Cloud infrastructure as code (AWS, Azure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes) • Database performance tuning and cost reduction (Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL) • Database migrations and modernisation • LLM and AI data work (RAG, text-to-SQL, data annotation pipelines) How I work I start by understanding the business problem, not just the ticket. You'll get clear written updates, honest estimates, and a heads-up early if something isn't going to plan. I'm UK-based and regularly work across US and Australian time zones. If you're planning a new data platform, or need an existing one to be faster, cheaper or more reliable, send me a short description and I'll tell you how I'd approach it.