Matiwos Desalegn

5+ years building with data and software (since 2021), including production data engineering at scale since 2024. I design and build governed data platforms for fintech and digital lending, from source integration and CDC to Gold models and BI, with ML features and retrieval on top as a second discipline.

• Senior Data Engineer, Kifiya Financial Technology PLC

  Jul 2026 to present, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  • Run 200+ tables in hourly CDC replication for a smart mobility partner, with exactly-once loads, using OLake, Apache Iceberg, dbt on Trino and Amazon Redshift.
  • Built a 6M-row Gold masterview (~16-table join) with dbt on Trino over Apache Iceberg, tested on its grain and served to BI through Apache Superset.
  • Built CI/CD for dbt with GitLab CI and Amazon EKS: automated promotion between environments and rollback when a release fails.
  • Built the lakehouse governance layer: lineage with OpenLineage and Marquez, PII cataloguing with OpenMetadata, and column-level access control and masking with Apache Ranger and Trino.
  • Operate 30+ production Airflow DAGs on EKS with retries, data-quality checks and alerting.

• Data Engineer, Kifiya Financial Technology PLC

  Oct 2024 to Jun 2026, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  • Built the company's first lakehouse on Amazon S3 with Athena and the Glue Data Catalog: 300+ tables cataloged from multiple institutional partners. Moving its pipelines from Mage AI to Airflow on EKS led to ~60% fewer pipeline failures.
  • Built the daily restore pipeline for on-premise sources: ~30M rows restored daily into Aurora PostgreSQL, later served from ClickHouse for self-service analytics.
  • Resolved a production database performance incident: 30+ staggered pg_cron materialized views ended a 95% CPU incident.
  • Designed the Amazon Redshift warehouse: ~39M rows/day across 30+ tables for multiple institutional partners, 146/146 data-quality assertions passing, and a near real-time warehouse integration that replaced batch jobs.
  • Built cross-cloud mobile analytics pipelines from Firebase Analytics and BigQuery into Apache Iceberg on Amazon S3, queryable in Trino.

• Software Developer, HST Consulting PLC

  Nov 2023 to Oct 2024, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  • Designed and built the frontend of the company's SaaS HR and payroll product.
  • Worked with the backend team to integrate the frontend with their REST APIs.
  • Worked in a small startup team building software for HR operations.

• wb-cdc-analytics: PostgreSQL to ClickHouse CDC in one command

  An independent reference implementation of a CDC analytics pipeline: a public REST API into PostgreSQL, Debezium into Redpanda, ClickHouse with dbt marts, Airflow, Prometheus and Grafana, started with one command.

• On-premise white-label RAG assistant for regulated institutions

  A fully on-premise, white-label assistant for regulated institutions: nginx with TLS, a FastAPI gateway with JWT and Keycloak SSO, PII redaction before inference, AnythingLLM retrieval and Ollama, in Amharic and English.

• How small, how quantized? Tokenizer, size and quantization for Amharic SLMs

  An independent study of how tokenizer choice, model size and quantization each affect Amharic small language models on a single consumer GPU, with QLoRA recovery tested; submitted to a 2026 workshop, in review.

• Amharic OCR for Ethiopic script with HHD-Ethiopic and MMOCR

  A full-stack OCR app for Ethiopic script: hierarchical detection, HHD-Ethiopic CTC recognition with confidence scores, multi-page PDFs and a Next.js canvas, plus an MMOCR research line with SATRN and DBNet++.

• Natural language to SQL analytics agent over ClickHouse

  A prototype that turns plain-English questions into ClickHouse SQL with a Groq-hosted model and returns tables, charts and a short explanation in a React chat interface; built as a technical assessment prototype.

Orchestration and pipelines

Apache Airflow, dbt, Mage AI, Apache Spark (PySpark), PyIceberg, ETL and ELT pipeline design, Airbyte

Lakehouse and storage

Apache Iceberg, Medallion architecture, Amazon S3 and Parquet, Trino, Apache Polaris catalog, Athena and the Glue Data Catalog

Streaming and CDC

Change data capture, Debezium, Apache Kafka, Redpanda, OLake, AWS DMS

Warehousing and modelling

Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Dimensional modelling, BigQuery, Apache Superset, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL

Cloud and platform

AWS data platform (S3, EKS, EMR Serverless, Lambda, EventBridge, Secrets Manager, IAM and IRSA), Kubernetes, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Linux

AI and ML engineering

Feast feature store, FastAPI, LangChain, CrewAI, LangGraph, Retrieval-augmented generation, ChromaDB, Qdrant, Keycloak, Embeddings for Ethiopian languages, LoRA and QLoRA fine-tuning, Model quantization, Hugging Face Transformers, Ollama, OCR for Ethiopic script, scikit-learn and XGBoost, TensorFlow and PyTorch

Observability and governance

Data contracts and quality gates, OpenLineage and Marquez, OpenMetadata, Apache Ranger, Prometheus and Grafana, Pipeline alerting and on-call hygiene

Languages

Python, SQL, Bash, TypeScript and JavaScript, Kotlin and Java (Android)

Learning

Apache Flink, Snowflake, Terraform

• Kifiya AI Mastery Training Program (KAIM): data engineering and machine learning intensive, 10 Academy, Jun 2024 to Aug 2024. Completed with distinction.
• BSc, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wolaita Sodo University, Sep 2018 to Jul 2023. GPA 3.69/4.0. Led the Google Developer Student Clubs chapter in the final year.
• Associate Data Engineer in Snowflake (career track), DataCamp, Jul 2026
• Associate Data Engineer in SQL (career track), DataCamp, Jul 2026
• Associate Data Engineer in Databricks (career track), DataCamp, 2026
• Inclusive Open Source Community Orientation (LFC102), The Linux Foundation, Aug 2026
• Intermediate SQL, DataCamp, Jul 2026
• Apache Airflow Essential Training, LinkedIn Learning, Feb 2026

• How Small, How Quantized? Tokenizer ≫ Size ≫ Quantization for Amharic SLMs on Consumer GPUs 2026
• The Evolution of RAG: From Naive Search to Agentic Intelligence 2025
• Just Completed an Exciting Student Dropout Prediction Project! 2024
• Walmart Sales Prediction 2024

• Google Developer Student Clubs Lead, Wolaita Sodo University, Aug 2022 to Jul 2023
• Google Crowdsource Influencer, Google Crowdsource, Sep 2022 to present
• Internal machine learning lectures, Kifiya Financial Technology (internal), Apr 2026 to Apr 2026
• Data-science to data-engineering handoff template, Kifiya Financial Technology (internal), May 2026 to present