Saurabh Chhajed

Hyderabad, Telangana, India • Author: ELK Stack Book

👨‍💻 Summary

15+ years in Big Data and ML Engineering, with expertise in distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP).
Experienced with Spark, Trino, Airflow, Hadoop, Docker, Kubernetes.
Skilled in building scalable ML pipelines and real-time recommender systems.

🏢 Work Experience

Lead Data/AI Engineer — Thoughtworks India

Oct 2024 – Present

Architected Promotion Analytics Engine with PySpark, DBT, and BigQuery.
Led a team of 10 engineers; integrated LightGBM via BigQuery ML for forecasting.

Lead Data Engineer — Salesforce India

June 2022 – Present

Built PB-scale metadata-driven ingestion pipelines with Kafka, Spark, Trino.
Designed GDPR-compliant leak scanners and a tokenization service.
Optimized Spark cluster usage by ~20% with Superset dashboards.

Lead Data/ML Engineer — American Express (via Impetus)

Dec 2014 – June 2022

Built merchant recommender using CatBoost, Word2Vec, collaborative filtering.
Reduced grid search time by 40% with Spark-based hyperparameter tuning.

Application Developer — JP Morgan Chase

Aug 2012 – Dec 2014

Built real-time data pipelines and analytics dashboards using the ELK Stack.

Systems Engineer — GE (via TCS)

Nov 2009 – July 2012

Re-architected legacy systems into Java microservices; saved $30k in process optimizations.

🎓 Education

B.E. in Computer Science, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Indore, 2009

Top 1% of batch

🛠️ Skills

Big Data: Spark, Trino, Hive, Hadoop, Iceberg, Airflow
Cloud: AWS (EMR, S3, IAM), GCP (BigQuery, Dataproc, Composer)
Languages: Java, Scala, Python, SQL, PL/SQL, Shell
DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Terraform
Security: GDPR Compliance, Tokenization, Leak Pipelines

🏆 Awards & Certifications

GCP Certified Professional Data Engineer
Cloudera Certified Hadoop Developer, MapR Spark Developer
PacktPub Author — Learning ELK Stack
5× TCS “On the Spot” GEM Awards
DZone Most Valuable Blogger (Top 5%)