Alex Azar
Senior Data Platform Engineer
I've spent 7 years inside fast-moving companies - a digital bank, an AI learning platform, a property SaaS - building the data infrastructure that let them scale. Now I do that for startups through AzCoding.
Why I built AzCoding
Over 7+ years I've been embedded inside fast-moving companies - a UK digital bank, a Series A AI learning platform, a UK SaaS property management company - and the same problem kept showing up: valuable data that nobody could use, because the infrastructure to make it reliable and trustworthy just hadn't been built properly. I inherited fragile pipelines, introduced better tooling, migrated platforms to proper lakehouse architectures, and each time the result was the same: teams that could finally trust their data.
The pattern was always the same: the right infrastructure, built properly, changes what a company can do. But most startups don't have the budget to hire a senior data team, and most agencies don't have the hands-on experience to build the real thing.
AzCoding is my answer to that gap. I work directly with founders and technical leaders to design and build data platforms that are clean, scalable, and, critically, yours to own. No black boxes. No unnecessary complexity. Just solid engineering your team can maintain and build on long after I'm done.
Where I've done it
Every role was hands-on. Every platform shipped to production.
Founder & Lead Data Engineer
CurrentAzCoding
Built AzCoding to bring enterprise-grade data engineering to startups and scaleups - without the enterprise overhead. Architecting cloud-native platforms, lakehouse infrastructures, and AI-powered data workflows for early-stage and high-growth companies.
- End-to-end data platform design on your cloud
- Lakehouse architectures, ETL/ELT pipelines, and streaming solutions
- AI-driven workflows and analytics applications
- Data governance, security, and cost optimisation advisory
Lead Data Engineer
Series A, AI Learning Platform
Promoted to Lead after modernising the core data platform to support enterprise-scale growth. Led security hardening, lakehouse migration, and a team.
- Reduced Redshift costs by 86% through cluster optimisation and query tuning
- Built a Lakehouse with Apache Iceberg - ACID ops, schema evolution, scalable analytics
- AWS-native ETL pipelines (S3, Glue, Athena, Step Functions) across global clients
- Enforced platform-wide encryption, governance, and compliance baselines
Data Engineer
Digital Bank
Joined a data engineering team at a high-growth UK digital bank serving hundreds of thousands of customers, contributing to the modernisation of core data pipelines. Focused on reliability, performance, and observable infrastructure.
- Refactored legacy PySpark and Python pipelines, cutting runtime by 50%
- Tuned Redshift query performance and distribution keys, reducing dashboard load times by 40%
- Introduced Airflow (MWAA) as the central orchestration layer, reducing operational overhead
- Contributed to improving the data transformation layer, reducing data issue triage time across the team
Full Stack Data Engineer
SaaS Property Platform
Founded and led the internal Data Team from scratch, building the full data infrastructure for a growing UK SaaS property management company.
- Architected centralised data warehouse on BigQuery - 50% faster report delivery
- Built an internal ETL tool with configurable 'Granularity Manager' (Java, Python, Flask)
- Reverse ETL pipeline from warehouse to CRM, improving sales targeting
- Deployed NLP-powered chatbot for customer success
Software, Data Engineering & Data Science roles
Different companies · 2019 – 2020 · Spanning full-stack development, data pipelines, and applied data science - the foundation that shaped a focus on end-to-end data platforms
BSc Computer Science - First Class
London Metropolitan University · 2016 – 2019
Ready to build your data platform?
Tell me where you are and where you want to go. The first call is free, no pitch - just an honest conversation about what you actually need.