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layout default
title Resume
description Resume - Ricardo Gemignani, Staff Data Engineer & Engineering Leader
permalink /resume/

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{{ site.author.location }} • {{ site.author.email }} • gemin.us • LinkedIn

Summary

Data engineer and engineering leader with 19+ years building software and data systems. I treat data as information and pipelines as software: data modeling done right, well-tested Python and SQL, and systems teams can operate at 3am. Petabyte-a-day pipelines at Booking.com; at iptiQ (Swiss Re), the lakehouse migration that cut the critical daily pipeline from 9 hours to 20 minutes, while helping scale the data team from 4 to 20. Player-coach by preference — equally at home owning a design end to end or growing the engineers who will. Currently running Geminus, a data engineering consultancy.

Experience

Founder & Principal Consultant

{: .job-title} Geminus | Jan 2025 – Present | Minneapolis (Remote) {: .job-meta}

Data engineering consultancy delivering short- and medium-term projects in parallel for clients across Europe and the Americas: pipeline engineering, data migration, architecture, and system design.

  • Delivered engagements across UK, Netherlands, and Germany: data collection infrastructure, pipeline optimization, data migration
  • Ran multiple concurrent short- and medium-term projects across North and South America — scoping, prioritization, stakeholder management, and delivery across time zones
  • Owned architecture and system design end to end: requirements through production, including data modeling and pipeline design decisions
  • Built scalable data collection system for UK tech company enabling market intelligence capabilities
  • Diagnosed and resolved critical pipeline failures for European fintech, restoring production reliability
  • Designed migration strategy for German enterprise with comprehensive validation framework ensuring data integrity

Tech: Python, SQL, AWS, data migration patterns, validation frameworks {: .tech}

Staff Data Engineer

{: .job-title} iptiQ (Swiss Re) | Jun 2021 – Dec 2024 | Amsterdam (Remote) {: .job-meta}

Hands-on multi-domain data lead at Swiss Re's InsurTech subsidiary — owned data models and pipelines across business-critical domains while helping scale the team from 4 to 20.

  • Architected and led the lakehouse migration (RDS → S3/Athena/Glue with dbt and Airflow) cutting the critical daily pipeline 96% (9h → 20min) at millions of events/day, 99%+ uptime — the pattern other domains then adopted
  • Owned data models and pipelines across 3 business domains (Marketing/Sales, Product, Actuarial), serving 6-7 senior stakeholders reporting into C-suite
  • Reduced incidents ~80% with validation frameworks, data contracts, SLOs, and early-risk communication
  • Core technical interviewer for the 4→20 scale-up (50+ interviews): designed the interview framework around SQL, data modeling, and algorithms; ran a 12-week mentorship program
  • Replaced ad-hoc scripts with shared, tested Python libraries adopted across all data domains
  • Chose serverless (Athena) over a dedicated warehouse — ~10x cheaper at equal performance

Tech: Python, SQL, dbt, Airflow, AWS (S3, Athena, Glue, RDS, ECS, MWAA), Terraform {: .tech}

Data Engineer

{: .job-title} Booking.com | Dec 2018 – Jun 2021 | Amsterdam {: .job-meta}

Data engineer on marketing platforms (PPC & Attribution) supporting ~$12B annual ad spend.

  • Operated petabyte-scale PPC pipelines (~1 PB/day) on a 16-node bare-metal Hadoop cluster at 99%+ SLA
  • Maintained 200+ production pipelines with strict 9-hour processing windows feeding multi-million-euro bidding decisions
  • Built Kubernetes-native pipelines feeding Markov-chain multi-touch attribution over trillions of events
  • Migrated ephemeral outputs to BigQuery, opening the data to analytics teams
  • On-call "fort-holder" every 6 weeks, triaging critical failures on business-critical systems

Tech: Hadoop, BigQuery, Kafka, Kubernetes, Python, Perl {: .tech}

Staff Software Engineer / ML Engineer

{: .job-title} Talpa Network / Emesa | Sep 2016 – Dec 2018 | Amsterdam {: .job-meta}

Led ML engineering at vakantieveilingen.nl, one of the Netherlands' largest online auction platforms.

  • Productionized ML auction pricing system (multi-factor regression) processing ~800M auctions/month, moving models from data-science notebooks to reliable production services
  • Built real-time prediction service handling ~300 predictions/sec with online regression in Python, plus batch prediction pipelines for campaign planning
  • Built recommendation engine (collaborative filtering + batch regression) scoring millions of user-item pairs daily, with A/B-tested lift in cart additions
  • Designed feature-engineering and model-serving data pipelines on Kafka/Avro with Redis and Elasticsearch; established model monitoring and "model card" documentation patterns
  • Led two ML teams (auction optimization, recommendation engine); founded Python guild (~10-15 engineers) with shared ML libraries and coding standards
  • Bridged data science and business, translating "profit per minute" into production systems

Tech: Python (pandas, NumPy — online/batch regression, collaborative filtering, feature engineering), Kafka, Avro, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Docker, A/B testing {: .tech}

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead

{: .job-title} Grupo RBS | Dec 2014 – Jul 2016 | Porto Alegre, Brazil {: .job-meta}

Led technical redesign of CMS at major Brazilian media company (8 newspapers, 2 TV channels, 8 radio stations).

  • Cut content publishing time from hours to minutes with a microservices architecture
  • Technical lead for ~6 engineers, guiding architecture and mentoring on service-oriented design
  • Built weather data service aggregating international and local Brazilian sources
  • Introduced caching layers (Varnish, Redis) improving editorial workflow performance

Tech: Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, MongoDB, Oracle, Docker, Redis {: .tech}

Founder & Technical Director

{: .job-title} Fleye | Feb 2006 – Aug 2014 | Porto Alegre, Brazil {: .job-meta}

Founded and led bootstrapped software company for 8+ years.

  • Built the engineering team from zero; 50/50 hands-on development and leadership
  • Delivered multiple production products across Java, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
  • Created an engineering culture that outlived the company — team members later founded their own company together

Skills

Data: Data Modeling, Data Engineering, Data Pipelines, ETL/ELT, Data Migration, Data Quality, ML Productionization

Languages & Tools: Python, SQL, dbt, Apache Airflow, Kafka, BigQuery, PostgreSQL

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (S3, Athena, Glue, RDS, ECS, MWAA), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker

Leadership: Team Building, Technical Hiring, Mentorship, Stakeholder Management, Cross-functional Collaboration

Location

Based in Minneapolis, MN. US work authorization. Open to remote and hybrid opportunities.