Resume - Paul Symons

The original source of this document is https://www.tind.au/resume/

Value Proposition

After 25 years in hands-on solution delivery, I know how to architect and build systems that create valuable information. Further, I know how to communicate effectively with others to encourage empathy, foster collaboration and harness SME knowledge to deliver meaningful results.

I engender trust by actively listening, digging deep on problems and prescribing outcomes instead of solutions. Making space for others to grow and develop whilst always remaining open to growth myself, I absorb the experience of others and respect the toil of what came before, to help define what will deliver future success.

I am an Australian Citizen and live near Perth, Western Australia.

Learn more about me on the TIND website

Contact me on LinkedIn or by email

Education

BSc Computer Science, 2000 - Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh UK

Recent Career Highlights

Compentencies

A sample of tools, technologies and techniques I've developed experience in during my career:

Cloud

  • AWS & Azure
  • Automation
  • Build Pipelines
  • Containers
  • Data & Analytics
  • Key Management
  • Linux
  • NoSQL & Relational Databases
  • Reliability Engineering
  • IAM & Security
  • Serverless
  • Storage
  • Streaming

Data

  • Airflow
  • CDC
  • DataBricks
  • dbt
  • dbtCloud
  • De-duplication
  • ELT+ETL
  • Fivetran
  • AWS Glue
  • Kimball Design
  • Python
  • Amazon RedShift & Athena
  • Snowflake
  • SQL
  • Spark: pyspark, sparkUI

Software

  • API Development
  • Build Systems
  • Clean Architecture
  • Java / Kotlin
  • Microservice Design
  • Packaging & Artifacting Dependencies
  • React + CSS
  • Refactor & Re-platform
  • Software Frameworks
  • TDD+BDD
  • Javascript, Typescript, Python, Java, Kotlin, HTML5

Previous Roles

  • Principal Consultant

    2024 - present

    Pioneer Credit (13 weeks - subcontract) - Kickstarting the customer migration from on-premise to cloud

    Key Focus Areas:

    • Understanding the customer's tooling preferences, engineer experience, and aspirational outcomes
    • Designing, documenting and collaboratively implementing Data Integration and Transformation workflows with Fivetran, Azure Data Factory and dbt core
    • Analysing customer's governance requirements; design and implementation of security solutions to ensure RBAC flow through from Azure AD, and combination of tag-based column masking and row level security to safeguard sensitive data
    • Continous collaboration and documentation to emboss the solutions in the customer consciousness

    Data Vanguards (2 weeks - subcontract @ Resources client) - Solution Architecture and Analysis

    Key Focus Areas:

    • Evaluation of various Data Catalog Products for fit to customer requirements
    • Solution Architecture self-service transformation; re-platform of existing Redshift cluster to Redshift Serverless with dbt cloud

    Rent.com.au - Data Platform Maturity Assessment

    Key Focus Areas:

    • Interviews and Solution deep dives to understand current state, and pain points
    • Production of assessment report with executive summary, technical assessment, and non-functional appraisal

  • Principal Data Architect

    2022 - 2024

    Led and mentored a team of 2 other devops / data engineers to deliver a cloud data platform for a large volume of telemetry data: ingested from S3, loaded to Iceberg tables, transformed with dbt and visualised with Grafana

    • Migrated from a single instance TimescaleDB to a S3 and Iceberg data lake using Athena and dbt
    • Created a solution to translate 2000+ Grafana dashboards (and SQL) from TimescaleDB to Athena
    • Used a off the shelf data loader to format, compress and ship PLC data to data lake
    • Created a solution to generate dbt packages of models to transform 6,000+ telemetry signals into respective domain tables

    Our key innovation was building a serverless iceberg ingestion pipeline that used Athena to load data with low latency, similar to the Tabular product that was acquired by Databricks in 2024.

    The motivation for us was navigating around a few key constraints:

    • The expense of Kinesis Data Firehose for landing data
    • The cost and latency of running regular glue jobs, or cost of Kafka brokers / kinesis streams for use with Spark Streaming
    • The over-reliance on AWS products, expecting to support multiple cloud platforms (Athena can be replaced with Trino)

  • Principal Consultant

    2018 - 2022

    Completed 15 distinct engagements for 7 clients over 4 years, typically leading teams of 2-4 people.

    Highlights include:

    • Planned and implemented the integration and roll out of dbtCloud at a 'Big Australian' Resources client
    • Workshops and demonstrations with several clients on the benefits and experience of working with dbt (core)
    • Design and implementation of a serverless data integration between on-premise Oracle and Snowflake Data Warehouse, including schema auto-detection and migration, three years prior to Snowflake's INFER_SCHEMA feature release
    • Assisting the cloud platform team at a security conscious insurance company onboard AWS Glue in a constrained environment

  • Tech Lead

    2017 - 2018

    • Led a small team to deliver a simplified home loan credit decisioning solution using a mixture of vendor (Experian) and Java products
    • Automated the packaging and delivering of vendor artifacts into JAR consumables to simplify integration
    • Introduced bespoke JUnit integration testing of the Experian decisioning software platform, run as regression tests in the build pipeline

  • Java Developer

    2011 - 2017

    Developed backend Java services and frontend HTML and Javascript experiences for Business Banking at Bankwest

(more on request)

Certifications

All certifications are available on the Credly website

Reference Material

Case Studies

Technical Blogs

Side Projects

↑ Back to Top