Founding Engineer

Location: Atlanta, Georgia, United States Remote: Yes (Remote-first preferred) Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Go, SQL, PySpark, Databricks, Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, AWS, Azure, GCP, Great Expectations, Prometheus, Grafana, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform Résumé/CV: https://johnrowedata.vercel.app/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-rowe-65355546/ Email: jjohn.rowe5k@gmail.com High-agency Principal Data Engineer / Founding Architect with $13$ years of experience designing, scaling, and taking complete ownership of high-throughput data platforms in complex, high-stakes environments (biotech R&D and global development). What I do: Zero-to-One Architectures: Design and scale robust lakehouse infrastructures (Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, BigQuery) that transform highly fragmented, multi-source raw streams into clean, reliable analytical surfaces. Defending Data Integrity: Implement automated, self-healing "trust gates" using Great Expectations and schema-validation pipelines to catch and quarantine malformed records at ingestion, guaranteeing $100\%$ downstream data integrity. Performance & Cloud Optimization: Re-engineer legacy batch workloads into optimized, containerized DAGs (Airflow, PySpark, Terraform), cutting processing latency by up to $65\%$ and reducing cloud compute overhead by $25\%$. Engineering Posture & Mentorship: Led and mentored high-performing engineering teams of $12+$, establishing modern DataOps and SRE monitoring postures (Prometheus/Grafana) that cut incident response times by $60\%$. Previously: Principal Data Engineer at GSK (R&D Analytics), Senior Data Engineer at The World Bank (won the Technology Excellence Award in 2020). I am looking for Founding Engineer, Principal Data/Platform Engineer, or Technical Architect roles in high-trust, high-agency environments where system design and engineering directly drive business strategy. Feel free to reach out!