Vinay Ambalihalli

Work

Twenty years building data platforms, nine of them in healthcare. The short version is below. The full résumé is a better fit for detail.

Experience

2020–now

Staff Data Engineer & Product Architect

eHealth, Inc. · Santa Clara, California

Architecture and governance owner for the enterprise data platform behind a national health insurance marketplace covering Medicare, Medicaid supplement, individual and family, small group, and ICHRA. A Snowflake and Databricks lakehouse fed by change-data capture, streaming, and batch integration from a microservices estate.

I own architecture review and approval, data governance, and SOX compliance for everything the data engineering team ships. I lead a subset of the data organisation day to day and have run onshore and offshore delivery teams on our customer and partner data programmes.

The work I am proudest of: rebuilding customer identity resolution to unify records across transactional, web, and telephony channels, and building the component library that turned onboarding a new source from a bespoke engineering project into a configuration exercise.

2017–2020

DW/BI Architect, Pharmacy Data Warehouse

Kaiser Permanente · Pleasanton, California

Architected and operated the pharmacy data warehouse for an integrated health plan serving more than ten million members, integrating prescription, formulary, patient, and finance data downstream of the pharmacy claims systems.

Migrated brittle cron-based orchestration to Apache Airflow with parameterised DAGs, and built the CRM and reporting framework that Kaiser Permanente International adopted as its operational system of record. All of it under HIPAA change control, which teaches you fast that traceability is a design constraint rather than paperwork.

2013–2016

Data Warehouse & BI Lead, Merchandising and Finance

Belk · Charlotte, North Carolina

Led a hybrid onshore and offshore team of eight delivering data engineering and analytics across merchandising, allocation, pricing, invoice match, and store sales. Owned requirements, design, estimation, and delivery, and worked directly with merchandising leadership on the platform roadmap.

Wrote the business case for the enterprise BI platform and data lake migration. That was the first time I had to argue for a platform investment in the language of the people paying for it, and it changed how I think about architecture.

2008–2012

BI Architect and Onsite Lead

TIAA-CREF · Charlotte, North Carolina

Onsite lead for the analytics platform supporting retirement plan administration: plan lifecycle management, institutional reporting, and automated distribution to plan administrators. Regulated reporting, where being wrong has consequences beyond a broken dashboard.

2005–2008

Software Engineer

Cognizant · Bangalore, India

Where I learned the craft. CRM, data warehouse, and analytics delivery for clients in financial services, logistics, telecommunications, and media across North America and Asia-Pacific.

Technical depth

Data platforms
Snowflake, Databricks, Delta Lake, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Teradata, MySQL, DocumentDB. Warehouse and lakehouse design, dimensional and canonical modelling.
Processing
Apache Spark and PySpark, including the parts that matter in production: partitioning strategy, shuffle reduction, memory configuration, and reading a DAG when a job that ran fine yesterday does not.
Integration
Kafka, change-data capture, Apache Airflow, Matillion, Informatica, Oracle Data Integrator. Real-time, near-real-time, and batch, and knowing which one a problem actually needs.
Languages
Python, SQL, PL/SQL, shell, JavaScript, TypeScript.
Cloud
AWS (Lambda, S3, SQS, EC2), Vercel, Docker, Git and GitHub, CI/CD, serverless deployment.
Quality and governance
Reconciliation and count-validation frameworks, lineage, automated data dictionaries, row-level and object-level security, SOX compliance ownership, regulated SDLC and change management.
Machine learning
Production ML pipelines, ML-based entity resolution on distributed compute, and local retrieval-augmented generation over contextual enterprise data.
Analytics
Looker and LookML, Tableau, OBIEE and BI Publisher. Semantic layer design and self-service enablement.
Leadership
Architecture review and approval, standards definition, onshore and offshore delivery, estimation, mentoring, and the occasional cross-functional escalation that needed a recommendation rather than a complaint.

Education

Product Management Certificate, Stanford University School of Engineering.
B.E. Electronics and Communications, Visvesvaraya Technological University.
Oracle Certified — Business Intelligence Server Architect and Analytics Application Developer.